465457 - line-breaking should be sensitive to the language

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, enhancement)

Description

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_5; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.20.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081112 Minefield/3.1b2pre

Line-breaking rules should be tailored according to the language. This affects, for example, breaks before or after quote mark characters.

See bug 450088 (line breaking in CJK text) for background.

If the line-breaking code was aware of language, we could also consider introducing language-appropriate hyphenation here to improve text layout especially in narrow columns.



Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

Auto-hyphenation deserves (and probably already has) its own bug, but it's certainly something interesting to work on.

But keep in mind that, this being the Web, the language metadata will usually be missing, and when it isn't missing it will often be wrong.

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Yes, that's certainly true. It's not something we'd want to turn on by default, I guess, but it could be a feature that web page authors explicitly request - along with specifying the language.

Comment 3

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

I think for line-breaking rules, we can probably get away with just using the language information if it's there, since they're often edge cases where we could go either way anyway.

For auto-hyphenation, we probably do want Web authors to opt-in via some CSS rule. I'm afraid of compatibility issues anyway, if we just turn it on.