Re: LYNX-DEV Treatment of ­ ?

[Klaus Weide]

On Sun, 13 Apr 1997, Nikhil Nair wrote:

> 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: [ snipped ]
>
> 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? :-) 

That sounds like a good argument :)
I would think that technically a ­ character which is not in a word
is an incorrect use.

> More importantly, how do the
> graphical browsers (Netscape Navigator and MS Explorer) handle this?

I think none of them do the right thing.  
 
> The trouble is, this is used extensively in The Times and the Sunday Times
> newspapers.  

Please give some example URLs.

> I could ask them to change this if it's incorrect HTML, but

It is not even a matter of HTML, but of the underlying character set
standards...

> they may be unwilling if the graphical browsers cope OK with it ....  

Well it seems Netscape have invented their own _HTML tag_ <WBR> for this
purpose which is _already covered by the character set_.  Make a guess
what that indicates about their willingness to support the
Internationalisation RFC...

> 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?  

It could be resonable (as a form of error recovery) to show a hyphen
character when &shy; is used outside of a word.  Of course I don't
know what Fote thinks about this (who implemented the SOFT_HYPHEN
logic).  There is also no guarantee that people who misuse &shy; to
get some graphically different sort of hyphen will only use it outside
of words  But Lynx should at least deal with any occurrence within a word
in the correct way - after all somebody may be using &shy; who actually
knows what it is supposed to do. 

> I'm finding it rather difficult to
> read sentences in which the dashes are just omitted in the speech ...

You should still try to talk to those people to clue them in.  I haven't
seen those pages, but I doubt that they need that misuse of &shy; for
anything that is otherwise impossible to achieve.

  Klaus

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