[whatwg] Hyphenation

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009, Markus Ernst wrote:
> > 
> > While I appreciate the problems faced by Swedish, German, and othes, I 
> > don't think this is a big enough problem to deserve solutions more 
> > complicated than the soft hyphen at this time.
> 
> Jukka Korpela stated that the intention of the soft hyphen is not 
> actually a hyphenation hint: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/shy.html

As far as I can tell this is a non-issue; HTML5 defers to Unicode for the 
semantics of its characters, and Unicode is clear here. HTML5 doesn't 
support ISO 8859-1 (it always treats content labeled as such as a Win1252 
mapping to Unicode).


> The wish for an in-text hyphenation mechanism is of course motivated by 
> the habit of how we do it in office and layout softwares, where text and 
> presentation are not separated. I totally agree that the appropriate 
> place for it is presentation, thus CSS, and the CSS3 draft looks quite 
> reasonable: http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-css3-gcpm-20070205/#hyphenation
> 
> Anyway I don't find anything about the format of the hyphenation 
> dictionary. To replace in-text hyphenation hints it is necessary to have 
> several levels of hyphenation quality - the german word for "hyphenation 
> mechanism" for example, "Trennungsmechanismus", you might want to have 
> hyphentated at any possible place inside body text, but only at 
> "Trennungs-mechanismus" in a headline. I see that this list is not the 
> appropriate place for suggestions about CSS3 properties - maybe someone 
> can point me to the appropriate place?

www-style at w3.org is the appropriate place. See the "Status of this 
document" section of the draft you cite above.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'