[whatwg] Interaction of <wbr> and CSS white-space

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 5/16/11 8:34 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 7:27 PM, Boris Zbarsky<bzbarsky at mit.edu>  wrote:
>> Whether to prioritize is a CSS issue.  Whether there's a breakpoint at all
>> after the 'f' in the string "y = f(1)" is a quality of implementation issue,
>> imo.
>
> Slightly tangential, but I once saw a page that displayed fine in
> Gecko but broke horribly in WebKit because of the difference in
> line-breaking algorithms.  There was a really long string in a user
> comment which Gecko broke over multiple lines but WebKit treated as
> unbreakable, with the result that WebKit stretched the page so it was
> unreadable.  I think it would be pretty nice if we were to spec
> line-breaking behavior -- UAX#14 specifies an algorithm that, as far
> as I can tell, is reasonably simple and much better than any browser
> now has.  (Although I can't say whether it would be acceptable for
> performance or other considerations.)

I'm not a line-breaking expert.  I'm pretty sure that the people who 
wrote the Gecko line-breaking code are very familiar with UAX#14, 
though, based on their code comments and bug comments.  I'd suggest 
asking for their input on why Gecko does something different from UAX#14 
if we're considering specifying it.

-Boris