- From: Bruce Bailey <bbailey@clark.net>
- Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 17:43:17 -0500
- To: "'Web Accessibility Initiative'" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Is there a character for a "non-breaking hyphen"? I want a dash that is treated like any other non-space alphanumeric character: i.e., one that, if near the end of a line, causes the line to wrap at the space before the text that precedes the hyphen rather than just after the hyphen. An equivalent Navigator-ism would be <nobr>-</nobr> (not valid html). − is logical, but is kind of an abuse (and not compatible with the 3.x browsers). I know about ­ why not a &hhy; ? A proper "en dash" (– or – ) is a little to large and is not compatible with 3.x browsers. I even went so far as to try – -- it's also too big (but it IS compatible with the 3.x browsers) but wraps the same as a regular dash/hyphen. (Yes, I know this "illegal" character gets the hackles up of the Unix crowd -- but I still blame _them_ for leaving fundamental typographical characters out of the 3.2 character set!) I can't find anything that works. I am tempted to create a IMG graphic, but I am sure that it will mess up my line height, this technique is not scaleable, and I just can't believe I am the only person who needs this. On a related, but perhaps equally off topic question, is there a straightforward HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" statement that would make my use of "windows" characters between  and Ÿ legal? There was a whole discussion of this earlier, and people generously sent me URLs to academic discussions of characters sets. I learned a great deal, but there was a lot I could not follow. In particular, I could not discern a truly cross-platform backwards-compatible way to generate typographical quotation marks. I am still using “ and ” and plan to do so until Navigator and IE support the <Q> ... </Q> construct. What is the correct channel to go through to suggest missing characters? The official W3C specs themselves point out that the basic mathematical symbols "implies" and "is implied by" (as well as the more obscure "not a super set of") are omitted. URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/html40/sgml/entities.html#h-24.3.1 Thank you. -- Bruce Bailey
Received on Friday, 10 December 1999 18:23:37 UTC