Re: LYNX-DEV Treatment of ­

[Foteos Macrides]

"William I. Johnston" <address@hidden> wrote:
>I've recently been developing a monospaced font for Macintosh 
>users to use in their web browsers that will render all the valid 
>HTML entities. This is necessary because the Mac font encoding is
>different from other platforms, so usual Mac fonts don't present
>eth, thorn, frac14, and other entities.
>
>In doing this, I notice that the &shy; entity is mapped to an
>en dash in Macintosh fonts, which may explain why some people 
>are coding their HTML files to present a space-&shy;-&shy;-space
>in order to achieve a wordspaced em dash -- which can also be
>presented thus -- in their files.
>
>Reading your thread about &173; encouraged me to develop a web
>document to test the behavior of this entity in various browsers.
>Point your favorite browser to
>
>http://world.std.com/~wij/shy.html
>
>and see what happens. 
>
>So far, Lynx wins by correctly rendering a break in the long word
>as necessary, and suppressing the presentation of all the other
>discretionary (soft) hyphens.
>
>I've tested this document on various Macintosh browsers, including
>Netscape Navigator 3.01, MS Internet Explorer 3.01, and MacWeb 2.0.
>None of them suppresses the soft hyphens, and most of them don't
>even break the line, thus failing in two important ways in the
>presentation of the &173; entity.

        Note that fotemods treats <shy> or <hy> as &shy; or &#173;
so you can use an element instead of entity for soft hyphenation
with Lynx, but have other browsers simply ignore it as an unknown
tag, rather than inserting hard hyphens where they don't belong.
It looked promising for a while that the W3C might adopt that,
with shy or hy as the element name, but it doesn't look promising
any more (but so what, you can use it with Lynx, and cause no
problems for other browsers :).

                                Fote

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 Foteos Macrides            Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research
 address@hidden         222 Maple Avenue, Shrewsbury, MA 01545
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