Hyphenation rules the nation
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Thursday 23 July 2009 04:17

As I mentioned earlier, I'm working on a Perl
module called HTML::Hyphenate, and now rolling out
a test on this blog. I've added a filter in my main
Bricolage web template that inserts all the soft
hyphens in the body of every page. So if your
browser is not totally retarded you could see some
words on this page being broken onto more than one
line, and the text of the posts should be nicely
justified. If your browser is somewhat retarded you
might just see all the inserted soft hyphens as
dashes and read this text very slow. My sort of
english doesn't have very long words, but since I
set the hyphenation algorithm to use a minimum word
length of five characters words like "water" can
already be broken into "wa-ter". Languages other
than en_US should also be handled correctly, and
even scripts like Sanskrit and Mongolian should
just work. And of course Arabic, because that
doesn't have hyphenation.

Different browsers do of course different things.
Opera for example places the dashes as which the
soft hyphens are revealed as at breaks like they
appear outside of the text box. Which is ugly.
Safari does it better, lynx seems to ignore the
soft hyphens, Amaya shows them as dashes. Browsers
could of course implement the algorithms themselves
and do the hyphenation without the author supplying
all the points, but doing that suddenly won't make
the web look much better. As soon as you start with
hyphenation a lot of things can break. You need to
specify the language for every word so for example
german words don't get weird breaks as if they were
english, and insert nobr tags or CSS equivalents to
prevent ugly stuff, like "Star-ck". So now I have
to look into CSS to see if that in some way can be
used to tell that words should be broken
differently if they are the last word in a sentence
or paragraph.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/work/2009/07/23/hyphenation-rules-the-nation/