Re: <NOBR> - Returning to the question....

> [Original Message]
> From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
> To: <www-html@w3.org>
>
> On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, L. David Baron wrote:
>
> > The hyphen-minus character
> > gets its own character class (HY), and breaks between HY followed by NU
> > (numeric character class) are forbidden.  See rule LB18 in [2].
>
> That's simply insufficient, since the hyphen-minus may well act as a minus
> sign in an algebraic expression like "-a".

Well in the case of HYPHEN-MINUS, if you, the author, know that it is
supposed to be a HYPHEN or a MINUS, you could always just simply
use the HYPHEN or the MINUS instead of the HYPHEN-MINUS.
Outside of programming code, that shouldn't cause any problems at all,

In any case, the suggested algorithm for how to handle HYPHEN-MINUS
is just that, a suggestion.  The behavior of the HY line breaking class
is informative not normative in UAX #14.

> So if I write "the normal plural suffix in English is '-s'", is it quite
> OK for a browser to insert a line break after the hyphen-minus? And am
> I supposed to introduce artificial <span> markup and some CSS code
> just to prevent that? Isn't enough to use <nobr>? It's not some funny
> span element I have in mind with some optional suggestion; I know
> pretty well that I just want to prevent the wrong line break. (And using
> the hyphen character, U+2010, would not help here. The Unicode
> linebreaking rules permit a line break after it.)

Since the BA line breaking class, of which HYPHEN is a member,
is informative instead of normative, if an implementation wished to
improve on the algorithm by adding the rule: (OP|QU) BA ×
it is certainly free to do so.  If you aren't willing to leave this to the
UA to decide, then use U+2011 NON-BREAKING HYPHEN instead,
or one of the invisible glue characters such as ZWJ.  (In general,
WJ is the preferred glue character for inhibiting line breaking,
but it has problems in some current implementations.  Besides,
normally you don't have to worry about which character shaping
form LATIN SMALL LETTER S will use.)

> > This seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
>
> But this is not about the reasonability of compromises (which is
> debatable as I've explained). It's about implicitly (or is there an
explicit
> statement) imposing Unicode line breaking rules on HTML documents,
> without even giving authors any useful options of overriding them in
> simple HTML markup.

Explicitly using HYPHEN, NON-BREAKING HYPHEN, and MINUS
handles the HYPHEN-MINUS ambiguity when you know how you
want it the line to break around it.   For most other isolated cases,
&#8204; and &#8205; (ZWNJ and ZWJ) are sufficient.  You'll have
to come up with a better example to convince me that <nobr> is
needed for semantic reasons.

Received on Tuesday, 30 March 2004 19:30:37 UTC