RE: Give hint to browser about hyphenation: &php;

Historically, the soft hyphen was not supported by browsers. Internet
Explorer took the compatibility hit since version 5 to correctly support the
soft hyphen. I have not checked Mozilla but I hope they will support it too.

In all cases the soft hyphen is the right way to address this.

Michel Suignard
Microsoft

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave J Woolley [mailto:DJW@bts.co.uk]
Sent: Wed, May 24, 2000 7:08 AM
To: 'hattel@na.dk'; www-html@w3.org
Cc: Michael Sundstrøm
Subject: RE: Give hint to browser about hyphenation: &php;


> From:	Søren Hattel [SMTP:hattel@na.dk]
>  
> as programmer of dynamic content pages based on eg. databases I often
> encounter the problem of long words that break the design. The reason
> being that the browser cannot hyphenate words.
> 
	[DJW:]  A quick string search of the HTML 4.01 specification would
have
	found you this - the feature already exists.  (Actually, if a new
entity
	were needed, you would have to have it added to Unicode first!)

9.3.3 Hyphenation
In HTML, there are two types of hyphens: the plain hyphen and the soft
hyphen. The
plain hyphen should be interpreted by a user agent as just another
character. The
soft hyphen tells the user agent where a line break can occur.
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. For operations such as searching and sorting,
the soft
	hyphen should always be ignored.

In HTML, the plain hyphen is represented by the "-" character (- or
-).
The soft hyphen is represented by the character entity reference ­
(­ or
	­)

Received on Wednesday, 24 May 2000 14:11:29 UTC