Typography
Monday, August 19, 2002[11:29:18 AM]
Shocking. MSIE on Windows supports soft hyphens. As far as I know, it's the only browser that does.
A soft hyphen in html is ­. Put ­ in a word and WinIE will break a line at that point, and hyphenate the word. Some browsers are smart enough to ignore soft hyphens, even if they aren't smart enough to use them properly. Other browsers will display a random gibberish character.
If your web publishing system is smart enough to deliver different versions of documents to different browsers, you could give WinIE justified text with soft hyphens inserted in the words. With fairly long lines and adequate linespacing, you could make the WinIE version both pretty and readable.
You can get a public domain list of English hyphenations at the Moby project. Then you just need a quick script to compare words there with words in your documents and insert the soft hyphens. Information choreography at its finest.
Related freakiness. Did you know that some languages change the spelling of some words when hyphenated? I'd never heard of that before. More from: Peter and Olle.
Related hack. IE will break lines at punctuation, but Mozilla and other browsers won't. How could you hack this? What about inserting an invalid (non)html tag: absent-<maybe-break>minded?
© Copyright 2002 john robert boynton.
Last update: 9/8/02; 11:27:17 AM.