31304 - ­ doesn't render

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core Graveyard :: GFX, defect, P3)

Description

[Richard Zach]

As requested in bug 16872:

­ doesn't render.  Not sure if it's Linux only.

Linux build 2000.03.08.09.

Comment 1

[Richard Zach]

Attachment: Testcase

Comment 2

[Erik van der Poel]

Soft hyphen is supposed to be invisible, except at a line break:

  http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr14/

Relatively rarely used. Marking M20.

Comment 3

[TAKAHASHI Makoto]

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/text.html#h-9.3.3

says

Those browsers that interpret soft hyphens must observe the following
semantics: If a line is broken at a soft hyphen, a hyphen character must be
displayed at the end of the first line. If a line is not broken at a soft
hyphen, the user agent must not display a hyphen character. For operations such
as searching and sorting, the soft hyphen should always be ignored.

Comment 4

[Matthias Kerkhoff]

Setting to all. The described behaviour seems to apply to all plattforms.

Comment 5

[Hallvard B Furuseth]

Util you implement ­, I suggest you revert to before bug #9101 and render
it as a normal character.  Halfway implemented features are very annoying:
Since it did not render, I assumed it worked and begun to use it - until I
noticed some very bad line breaking.
As for why it's "relatively rarely used", maybe that's because it's relatively
rarely _implemented_:-)

Comment 6

[Tobias Burnus]

Better not to revert ­ to -; this makes it impossible to use it, since it
shouldn't be rendered *unless* there is a linebreak. (It is already worse that
Netscape <6 shows always the hyphen.)
[See also bug 47483 (Soft hyphen character does not render in XML)]
[and also bug  9101 ({feature} Soft hyphens displayed when they shouldn't be)]

| As for why it's "relatively rarely used", maybe that's because it's relatively
| rarely _implemented_:-)
The main reason that I don't use it is that Netscape renders this as "-" which
makes writtings essentially unusable!

Comment 7

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

> The main reason that I don't use it is that Netscape
> renders this as "-" which
> makes writtings essentially unusable!

Exactly, and IE 4 does it too. Luckily IE 5 supports it correctly (I haven't 
checked Opera), so we can start using it again. Soft hyphens should *not* be 
rendered if it isn't at the end of a line (that's the whole *point* of soft 
hyphens).

But Mozilla should support of course support soft hyphens. I accidently 
discovered this bug when trying to use a soft hyphen in a dialog box in my 
Norwegian localization, so it should work in *both* HTML and XUL. In Norwegian, 
and several other languages (e.g. German), we create new compound words by 
joining words together physically. Because of this, it is especially important 
that Mozilla supports soft hyphens (especially in XUL). Example:

A 'web browser' is called a 'nettlesar' ('nett' + 'lesar'), not a 'nett lesar' 
(which would mean a 'neat reader'!)).

I'm attaching a simple test case.

Comment 8

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

Attachment: Hyphenation testcase

Comment 9

[Robin Lionheart]

Since you mention it, Opera 4.0 'supports' it the same way Mozilla does-- by not
rendering it.

Comment 10

[Robin Lionheart]

­ not rendering is proper behavior. In fact, this behavior fixes bug 9101. I
think we can safely mark this INVALID.

Comment 11

[Amit J. Patel]

True, it should not render in general.  But it *should* render if it's at a line
break.  It looks like as of build 2000122908, ­ doesn't cause a line break
at all, which seems wrong.  The HTML 4 spec says ``The soft hyphen tells the
user agent where a line break can occur.''