Re: LYNX-DEV Treatment of ­ ?

[Nikhil Nair]

On Sun, 13 Apr 1997, Klaus Weide wrote:

> On Sun, 13 Apr 1997, Nikhil Nair wrote:
> 
> > [Problem that ` ­ ' displays as `  ', except when at the end of
> > the line, when it displays as ` -'.]
>
> No, it is not a bug...  RFC 2070 HTML Internationalization has this to
> say:
> 
>       NOTE -- the SOFT HYPHEN character (U+00AD) needs special attention
>       from user-agent implementers.  It is present in many character
>       sets (including the whole ISO 8859 series and, of course, ISO
>       10646), and can always be included by means of the reference
>       ­.  Its semantics are different from the plain HYPHEN: it
>       indicates a point in a word where a line break is allowed.  If the
>       line is indeed broken there, a hyphen must be displayed at the end
>       of the first line.  If not, the character is not dispalyed at all.
>       In operations like searching and sorting, it must always be
>       ignored.
> 
> There is no way (that I know) built into Lynx to configure this off.

Ah, I see.  That sounds perfectly reasonable.  What is the correct
behaviour when the ­ makes up a word on its own?  Technically, you
can't split an empty word, can you? :-)  More importantly, how do the
graphical browsers (Netscape Navigator and MS Explorer) handle this?

The trouble is, this is used extensively in The Times and the Sunday Times
newspapers.  I could ask them to change this if it's incorrect HTML, but
they may be unwilling if the graphical browsers cope OK with it ....  If
it's the case that the others use a nonstandard behaviour for this, might
it be possible for the next version of Lynx to include this behaviour,
possibly as a configuration option?  I'm finding it rather difficult to
read sentences in which the dashes are just omitted in the speech ...

Cheers,

Nikhil.

--
Nikhil Nair
Trinity College, Cambridge, England
Tel.: +44 1223 368353
Email: address@hidden
       address@hidden



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