Re: [css3-text] Proposed pruning & scoping of hyphenation properties

On Mar 18, 2011, at 6:26 AM, Christoph Päper wrote:

> Christian Stockwell:
> 
>> 2. In a similar vein, I don't see a use case for the "none" value for "hyphens".
> 
> People should use U+2011 (non-breaking hyphen) and similar characters for different scripts in those cases, but when they don’t this value could repair some of it. Not a strong use case, though. Furthermore, with ‘hyphenate-limit-before’ set to a value greater 1, my personal major use case for non-breaking hyphens (i.e. “e-mail” etc.) vanishes.
> 
> [...]
>> 5. … the hyphenate-limit-* properties should only apply when hyphens is set to "auto"
> 
> That made sense for me at first, but consider “e-mail”: I wouldn’t want a linebreak in there neither with ‘manual’ nor with ‘auto’, therefore I would set the limit to 2 or 3 characters (and I really should use a non-breaking hyphen, if I can control the data).
> 
>> conditional hyphens are already completely within the control of the author.
> 
> Content author and style author need not be the same person.

That last point is an important one. Even when they are the same person, I suspect there are a limited number of authors who could tell you how to type a conditional hyphen or non-breaking hyphen. Ideally these would be set by choosing the right character, but CSS could help with this a lot.

In the case of "none" for "hyphens", there are some additional cases. For instance, disambiguation of words such as "recreation" (fun or sport) and "re‑creation" (the act of creating again), or in company names where you want to make it clear that the dash is part of the name, or the dash in a phone number (people usually use a hyphen instead of an en-dash or something else more appropriate). But these are also places where, if hyphenate-limit-* is insufficient, then a span in the source might be needed to fix it anyway, at which point you might as well just use a non-breaking hyphen in the source (if you can figure out how to type it).

Received on Friday, 18 March 2011 16:10:36 UTC