Re: Hyphenation (was Re: A suggested tag)

> 3. Still, if aiming at perfectness, there should be a way to specify
>    the hyphenation of an _occurrence_ of a word - using some element
>    and associated attribute related to the occurrence, not to the word
>    in general. The reason is that a language may have words which
>    have the same spelling but should still be hyphenated differently.
>    Admittedly, this means that the orthography is not perfect. But
>    this is a fact of life. (Pobody is nerfect.)

Netscape currently supports <wbr> as an invisible word break point
but doesn't add a trailing "-" when the line is wrapped at this
point.  Needless to say IE 3.0 doesn't recognize this tag. Both
browsers map &shy; to a "-" character, but neither is able to wrap
the line after the &shy; entity.

It makes sense then to recommend that browser support wrapping after
&shy; and to introduce a new tag for invisible hyphenation points
that are also invisible in downlevel browsers.  What should thistag 
be called?  <W> doesn't seem sufficiently self evident. Some other
possibilities include <HYPHEN>, <SHY>, and <HY>

Dave Raggett - <dsr@w3.org> tel +1 617 258 5741 fax +1 617 258 5999
World Wide Web Consortium 545 Technology Square, Cambridge MA 02139

Received on Thursday, 17 April 1997 13:35:19 UTC