Re: Bug#428536: [Lynx-dev] problem on an ISO-8859-1 terminal

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2007-06-14 11:19:00 +0900, Atsuhito Kohda wrote:
> Maybe, usually, a hypen is directly connected to a letter
> and never(?) connected to a space, so one can understand easily
> that a space followed by a hyphen is not a hyphen itself.

An hyphen, probably. But the ASCII character "-" is overloaded (it
is called HYPHEN-MINUS in Unicode), and lynx cannot know its real
use. So, the formatting done by lynx is inconsistent.

> On the contrary, the minus sign admits, as a binary operator, 
> small spacing around it.

The minus is not necessarily a binary operator: it is also used for
negative numbers, and as a unary operator (for the negate function).

> If you use/know TeX you can guess what I mean.

TeX has complex rules to decide whether spaces should be added. But it
is not always right, and the user sometimes needs to fix the layout by
inserting things like {} in the document source. So, lynx should not
try to do like TeX for HTML (smart formatting could be done with MathML
though, but lynx doesn't support it).

Now, in my case, I recall that I had "x−y", and lynx displayed
"x -y" instead of "x-y". As "x -y" is asymmetric, it may be quite
confusing. Instead of the difference x minus y, one can understand it
as x followed by the opposite of y. Anyway, if there is an ambiguity
with the hyphen, the author can write "x − y". That's
not the goal of lynx to try to eliminate the ambiguities.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <address@hidden> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)