breaking hyphen?

[stevenkobes]

If a word has a hyphen in it, IE will permit a line break at the
hyphen, but Firefox/Mozilla won't. Apparently the Firefox behavior is
standards-compliant, but it is not what I want. Is there a way to
denote a hyphen in HTML, that the line can be broken after?

I've read some stuff about soft hyphens and non-breaking hyphens, but
those seem like the opposite of what I'm looking for. I want a normal
hyphen, that always appears, and I want the line to be breakable after
it in Firefox as well as IE.

Does anyone know if this is possible?

[Jukka K. Korpela]

st*********@hot mail.com wrote:

If a word has a hyphen in it, IE will permit a line break at the
hyphen, but Firefox/Mozilla won't. Apparently the Firefox behavior is
standards-compliant,
So is the IE behavior. The specifications are obscurely silent on the
matter. Technically, HTML 4.01 specification says that "the plain hyphen
should be interpreted by a user agent as just another character",
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/stru...t.html#h-9.3.3
but I don't think this is meant to disallow breaking after a hyphen as
was suggested in HTML 2.0 and as the Unicode standard defines.
Is there a way to
denote a hyphen in HTML, that the line can be broken after?

Using <wbr> after a hyphen is the practical way, e.g. as in
non-<wbr>breaking
The long answer is at
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/nobr.html#suggest

[David Ross]

"Jukka K. Korpela" wrote:

st*********@hot mail.com wrote:

If a word has a hyphen in it, IE will permit a line break at the
hyphen, but Firefox/Mozilla won't. Apparently the Firefox behavior is
standards-compliant,

So is the IE behavior. The specifications are obscurely silent on the
matter. Technically, HTML 4.01 specification says that "the plain hyphen
should be interpreted by a user agent as just another character",
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/stru...t.html#h-9.3.3
but I don't think this is meant to disallow breaking after a hyphen as
was suggested in HTML 2.0 and as the Unicode standard defines.

> Is there a way to
denote a hyphen in HTML, that the line can be broken after?

Using <wbr> after a hyphen is the practical way, e.g. as in
non-<wbr>breaking
The long answer is at
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/nobr.html#suggest

<wbr> is non-standard and not recognized by all browsers. It does
not exist in the HTML 4.01 specification.

Breaking and wrapping styles are indicated for CSS3. However, the
specification is still in flux with comments on the draft for the
affected text module being accepted until some time next year. I
don't know of any browsers that implement the proposed draft of the
CSS3 text module.

--

David E. Ross
<URL:http://www.rossde.com/>

I use Mozilla as my Web browser because I want a browser that
complies with Web standards. See <URL:http://www.mozilla.org/>.

[Eric B. Bednarz]

David Ross <no****@nowhere .not> writes:

"Jukka K. Korpela" wrote:
Let's add some emphasis here

Using <wbr> after a hyphen is the practical way, e.g. as in ^^^^^^^^^ non-<wbr>breaking
The long answer is at
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/nobr.html#suggest

<wbr> is non-standard

What-*standard*?

IIRC, just recently the use of the width and height attribute for the
IMG element type were suggested here for practical reasons. They are
non-*standard* as well and nobody appeared to complain, as far as I can
recollect.
and not recognized by all browsers.
It's recognized by most browsers that care about such details in the
first place, I dare saying. OTOH, lots of recommended or even
standardized element-types are either not recognized as well or --
worse, actually -- not processed properly (e.g. NOSCRIPT).
It does
not exist in the HTML 4.01 specification.

If it helps, the HTML 4.01 recommendation itself is non-standard.

[Eric B. Bednarz]

Eric B. Bednarz <be*****@fahr-zur-hoelle.org> writes:

OTOH, lots of recommended or even
standardized element-types are either not recognized as well or --
worse, actually -- not processed properly (e.g. NOSCRIPT).

My bad, SCRIPT and consequently NOSCRIPT are not part of ISO/IEC
15445:2000 either; make that e.g. 'e.g. Q' then.

[Alan Wood]

st*********@hot mail.com wrote:

If a word has a hyphen in it, IE will permit a line break at the
hyphen, but Firefox/Mozilla won't. Apparently the Firefox behavior is
standards-compliant, but it is not what I want. Is there a way to
denote a hyphen in HTML, that the line can be broken after?

This is a known bug in the Mozilla family:

<https://bugzilla.mozill a.org/show_bug.cgi?id =95067>

I reported it ages ago, and it was worked on for a while, but fixing it
is not currently assigned to anyone.

I don't understand why it is not being fixed. I reported the same
problem in Opera and Safari, and it was fixed quite quickly.

--
Alan Wood
http://www.alanwood.net (Unicode, special characters, pesticide names)

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Alan Wood wrote:

I don't understand why it is not being fixed. I reported the same
problem in Opera and Safari, and it was fixed quite quickly.

I don't think it was an improvement that Opera started dividing "-1"
into "-" at the end of a line and "1" at the start of the next line.

(Or consider the string "Latin-1". Do you really want "1" to go to the
next line?)

Granted, we can list down a dozen ways to prevent that. The problem is
that the average author knows none of them, does not even know the
problem exists except casually, and besides, all the dozen or more ways
have serious drawbacks. It's frustrating to decide between poor ways of
solving a problem that didn't exist before some software started to
break lines blindly by some rules.

A browser should _not_ break a string after a hyphen-minus character or
other special character _unless_ it applies reasonable constraints and a
working way to prevent the breaks is available. Nonbreaking hyphen won't
count, for several years. Unfortunately, the leading browser decided to
to break lines without reasonable constraints, so the more reasonable
behavior of Mozilla does not help authors. We need to learn the morale:

A word might be broken after a hyphen, or not be broken.

If this really matters, you probably have some boring work ahead. You
need to scatter extra markup around, perhaps quite a lot.

Yucca

[Alan Wood]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

I don't think it was an improvement that Opera started dividing "-1"
into "-" at the end of a line and "1" at the start of the next line.

(Or consider the string "Latin-1". Do you really want "1" to go to the
next line?)

I agree that a simple "allow break after a hyphen" rule is not an ideal
solution.

One possible improvement would be to add a condition that a break
should not be allowed if it would leave a string of 3 or fewer
characters at tne end or start of a line. Another possible improvement
would be not to allow a break between a hyphen and a number, so that
negative numbers are not broken.

Opera is working on a new rendering engine for version 9, and a preview
is available:
- Windows: <http://snapshot.opera. com/windows/w90p1.html>
- UNIX: <http://snapshot.opera. com/unix/u90p1.html>
- Mac: <http://snapshot.opera. com/mac/m90p1.html>

This would be a good time to test its breaking algorithm and provide
feedback. Opera do take notice of feedback.

--
Alan Wood
http://www.alanwood.net (Unicode, special characters, pesticide names)

[Andreas Prilop]

On Mon, 24 Oct 2005, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

If a word has a hyphen in it, IE will permit a line break at the
hyphen, but Firefox/Mozilla won't. Apparently the Firefox behavior is
standards-compliant,
So is the IE behavior. The specifications are obscurely silent on the
matter.

http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/ is "obscurely silent"?
Technically, HTML 4.01 specification says [...]

The document character set is Unicode. Therefore it is not necessary
to repeat in the HTML specification what is already said in the
Unicode standard.

--
Netscape 3.04 does everything I need, and it's utterly reliable.
Why should I switch? Peter T. Daniels in <news:sci.lan g>

[Andreas Prilop]

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

(Or consider the string "Latin-1". Do you really want "1" to go to the
next line?)
We have the non-breaking hyphen for this purpose.
The problem is
that the average author knows none of them, does not even know the
problem exists except casually,

The "average author" can't tell an acute accent (´) from
an apostrophe (').
http://www.helsinki.fi/images/harmaa_ranska.gif

--
Netscape 3.04 does everything I need, and it's utterly reliable.
Why should I switch? Peter T. Daniels in <news:sci.lan g>