[whatwg] Hyphenation

[Sander Tekelenburg]

At 20:22 +0200 UTC, on 2007-01-09, Henri Sivonen wrote:

[...]

>   * Not knowing Dutch, the example makes me guess that the diaeresis
> in Dutch has the same meaning as in French (indicate that vowels
> don't form a diphthong). If this is the case, the interaction of the
> diaeresis with hyphenation may even be a generalizable rule that
> could be hard-coded in Dutch-aware hyphenating browsers. Is it a
> generalizable rule?

I don't think you can generalize it like this, because, like many other
languages, dutch borrows from other languages (notable in this case would be
german). So there are dutch words where the umlaut has a different function
and thus the hypenation rule would be different.

[But note that, although I speak dutch, that doesn't make me a specialist...]

[...]

>   * Not having a language-specific dictionary available in a browser
> doesn't make things worse than the status quo, so it isn't that big a
> deal.

That's assuming status quos aren't bad :) (I wouldn't want to be a language
teacher in this day and age, where, due to computers' restrictions, your
students will constantly see bad examples.)

FWIW, my feeling is that it would be best if there'd be a defined format for
hyphenation rules, and browsers would accept such description files as a
plug-in. This would allow each language's specialist to write their rules,
and share them, without putting that burden on browser authors. (Browsers
could of course still be shipped with such rulesets.)


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>