Re: [css3-text] line break opportunities are based on *syllable* boundaries?

On 1/29/11 1:48 PM, Ambrose LI wrote:
> IMHO, the only thing CSS can realistically do is to provide a way for
> authors to specify “this group of characters is a word / personal
> name; don’t break it!” As far as I can tell, there’s no such mechanism
> in place.

Disclaimer: my knowledge of CJK is about nil.

Isn't "this group of characters is a word / personal name" a matter of 
_markup_, not style?  That is, to tell that a sequence of characters is 
a name seems like it either involves good understanding of the context 
the sequence is used in (sounds like a hard AI problem) or the author 
explicitly marking it up as a name; that's semantic information, not 
stylistic.  I seem to recall there being discussion about adding a 
<name> element to HTML5, though I'm not sure it went anywhere.

If it's marked up (<name>, <span class="name">, whatever), then it seems 
that all that's needed on the CSS end is saying that 
"white-space:nowrap" should prevent linebreaks even at non-whitespace 
breaking opportunities.  Which is what UAs do in practice, and what the 
spec seems to say already.

Am I just missing something?

-Boris