- From: Jukka Korpela <jkorpela@cc.hut.fi>
- Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 14:03:14 +0300 (EET DST)
- To: www-html@w3.org
Since the soft hyphen is so often mentioned in the context of hyphenation, I made some study and came into the following conclusion: There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about the soft hyphen character (abbrev. SHY, HTML notation ­). Although the ISO Latin 1 standard (ISO 8859-1) makes things perfectly clear, saying that it is a _visible hyphen, to be used in a specific context_, people in the Web community commonly regard it as hidden hyphenation hint. These two views are incompatible. The misunderstanding is probably caused by the strong needs for hyphenation of Web document. These needs are very real, but it is incorrect to try to answer to them in a manner which violates the character code standards. Moreover, explicit hyphenation hints can play only a very small role in the solution of the hyphenation problem, and the (mis)use of SHY would not even be the best way of giving hyphenation hints. For my arguments and asome additional notes, see http://www.hut.fi/~jkorpela/shy.html Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Thursday, 17 April 1997 07:03:41 UTC