Off Topic -- Hard hyphen?

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).  &minus; 
is logical, but is kind of an abuse (and not compatible with the 3.x 
browsers).  I know about &shy; why not a &hhy; ?  A proper "en dash" 
(&ndash;  or &#8211; ) is a little to large and is not compatible with 3.x 
browsers.  I even went so far as to try &#150; -- 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 &#127; and &#159; 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 &#147; and &#148; 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