Re: Soft hyphen

At 2003-12-03 01:07, Kade.Hansson@dpiwe.tas.gov.au wrote:

>Hi Lars,
>
>Based on the arguments in:
>
>http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/shy.html
>
>I would suggest you reconsider using soft hyphen at all.

Having studied Jukka Korpela's 1997 paper and also reviewed the April 2003 
discussion, which I must admit had not followed, I have come to the 
conclusion that, regardless of interpretation, Amaya does not handle SHY 
correctly.

This is not the time nor the place to reopen that discussion. However, 
taking a pragmatical view on this, Unicode 4.0 certainly defines SHY as a 
hyphenation hint and most web-browsers do the same [IE and Opera; 
Mozilla/Netscape suppress' the SHY and does not use it as a hyphenation point].

Correct or not, as a historical aside it might be interesting to know that 
my interpretation of SHY derives from the mid-1980s and the late Klaus 
Appel, sometime secretary of one of the ISO 8859 working groups and also a 
colleague of mine.

In defense of Amaya, it should be said that the original ISO 8859 
definition of SHY is obscure.

>  But equally,
>Amaya should preserve it as soft hyphen in all positions- better not
>second guess what the author might want. Though whether it chooses to
>render all hyphens as visible, which seems permissible by the standard
>[HTML4], I leave to Irene and her team's discretion.

My reading of the the HTML 4.01 standard differs from yours and seems to 
support my interpretation of SHY:

"Those browsers that interpret soft hyphens must observe the following 
semantics: If a line is broken at a soft hyphen, a hyphen character must be 
displayed at the end of the first line. If a line is not broken at a soft 
hyphen, the user agent must not display a hyphen character."
[HTML 4.01 "9.3.3 Hyphenation" 
<URL:"http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#h-9.3.3">]



Lars Bruzelius

SYSteam Udac AB
Box 174,
SE-751 04  Uppsala,
Sweden.

Telephone: +46 18 678054    E-mail: Lars.Bruzelius@udac.se
Telefax:   +46 18 516600    <URL:"http://www.udac.se">

Received on Wednesday, 3 December 2003 10:20:37 UTC