RE: Off Topic -- Hard hyphen?

Hi Al and Bruce,

In Unicode 2.0 (1996), in Chapter 7 'Code Charts', on page 7-155
'General punctuation', the following character is defined:

U+2011  NON-BREAKING HYPHEN
        (cross reference) U+002D - HYPHEN-MINUS

I believe this is what you're looking for.  I've copied Martin
Duerst (W3C Internationalization leader) to verify.

Cheers,
- Ira McDonald (outside consultant at Sharp Labs America)
  High North Inc

-----Original Message-----
From: Al Gilman [mailto:asgilman@iamdigex.net]
Sent: Friday, December 10, 1999 6:37 PM
To: 'Web Accessibility Initiative'
Subject: Re: Off Topic -- Hard hyphen?


1. There is the whitespace=nowrap formatting property that in theory should
accomplish what you are after if you wrap the whole <span
class='my-nowrap'>hyphenated-expression</span> and then style this class or
ID with the property whitespace=nowrap.

2. Missing characters should go to the Unicode Consortium.  It would be
good to get in touch with the internationalization, XML InfoSet, and/or
math groups depending on just what the character is, to find out if there
are others in W3C that care about this character one way or another.

Al

At 05:43 PM 12/10/99 -0500, Bruce Bailey wrote:
>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 Monday, 13 December 1999 14:42:50 UTC