Re: too late for <wbr>, too soon for &#x200B; ?

Doug Cooper wrote:
> 
>   Greetings from Bangkok.
> 
>   As far as I can tell, current browsers (eg. Netscape 4.6, 4.7)
> have done away with <WBR>, but still do not implement the
> zero-width space &#x200B; (the decimal doesn't work either).

Have you tried XML browsers, or just HTML ones?

> [...]  the notion
> that this is a solved problem.  It ain't.  Nor are algorithms like maximal
> matching at render-time much of a solution.

OK, so you are saying that the expectation is that explicit segmentation
using a zero-width space is acceptable to the community of SEA
non-segmented language users? Certainly it is a lot more tractable than
per-language dictionary lookup, for implementors.
 
>   I'm raising this issue now both in the hope of resurrecting <wbr>,

Unlikely, but more likely that correct processing of U+200B is mentioned in
specifications such as CSS and XSL. In XML, you can always declare your own
entity in the internal DTD subset of your document:

<!ENTITY wbr "&#x200B;" >

And then just write &wbr; wherever you need one inthe text. So the thing to
do is to ensure thatthose specs which relate to formatting and rendering
correctly handle this code point.

> and also of helping to make sure that any of the alternatives are
> generalizable, and not just 'let's hard wire language X and forget
> about the rest.'  

A good point and well taken.

--
Chris

Received on Thursday, 23 March 2000 10:50:59 UTC