I was referring to wrapping text on the markup site:
Like so:
<p>Hello, this is wrapped, like so, do you see?</p>
rather than:
<p>Hello, this is wrapped, like so, do you see?</p>
In both cases, UAs will render the content exactly the same... I was wondering if there were any advantages to the former... I heard something about some obscure UAs ignoring content beyond the 80th Column or something
-- -David R
Jeroen Visser [ vizi ] wrote:
The most important situation in which word-wrapping is useful is with justified text. Good word-wrapping prevents awkward word spacing in such text, rendering it more legible.
There are a few pittfalls though, with word-wrapping: it is language dependent and browsers are basically morons with regard to text-handling in general and word-wrapping in particular.
The only element I know to provide predictable word-wrapping is [wbr], but this is a non-XHTML element, thus needing a modified DTD which includes this element. And then again: [wbr] doesn't add a hyphen when a word is actually wrapped, so it is mainly useful in wrapping URL's and the like. The soft-hyphen (­) is sometimes used for wrapping purposes, but it was never intended for such use and produces unpredictable results across browsers.
Word-wrapping will only become a viable online typesetting option when browsers are capable of tapping into an OS provided spelling/wrapping/ grammar system. In such a situation, I can imagine a browser actually picking up [lang=""] attributes in mark-up to switch between wrapping rules and authors only needing to specify 'on' or 'off' for word-wrapping, e.g. through: p { word-wrap: (auto|no-wrap); }.
Until then, I just don't use any justified texts online. ;-)
Jeroen
****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
