Thad E G wrote: ↑2023-03-26, 22:45
not leaving or carrying over less than three letters
These settings look more reasonable than 5/6. However, my paradise may be someone else's hell. My use case is a bit special: bilingual webpages (Dutch & English). So I've set
hyphen: manual; and soft-hyphenate long words like
programmeertaalonderzoek (=
programming language research) manually as
programmeertaal[SHY]
onderzoek or even
programmeer[SHY]
taal[SHY]
onderzoek. I have become aware now that I could discriminate in favour of Dutch by making the
hyphens property dependent on the language used in a text fragment by classifying one of them as "dutch" (
auto) or "english" (
manual). I simply haven't thought of such micromanagement so far. First objection: who guarantees all browsers will listen to
hyphen: auto;?
Now that the whole thing has caught my attention, I did some experiments with the word
programmeertaal. It can be hyphenated at 3 places:
pro|
gram|
meer|
taal. The last one is perfectly fine, the others are correct but debatable from the readability point of view. I tried these four test cases with
<html language="nl"> in Pale Moon, Firefox, Chrome on Windows, and Safari on macOS (HYMIN = U+002D, HY = U+2010, SHY = U+00AD):
- programmeertaal
- programmeer[HYMIN]taal
- programmeer[HY]taal
- programmeer[SHY]taal
(Sub 2 & 3:
programmeertaal should never be written as
programmeer-taal on one line, I only did this for the sake of experimentation.) Results with
hyphens: auto;:
- PM, Ff, Chr: pro-/grammeertaal, program-/meertaal, programmeer-/taal; Saf: (no breaks)
- PM: pro-/grammeer-taal, program-/meer-taal; Ff, Saf: programmeer-/taal; Chr: pro-/grammeertaal, program-/meer-taal, programmeer-/taal
- PM: pro-/grammeer-taal, program-/meer-taal; Ff, Saf: programmeer-/taal; Chr: pro-/grammeertaal, program-/meer-taal, programmeer-/taal
- PM, Chr, Saf: programmeer-/taal; Ff: program-/meertaal, programmeer-/taal (and why not pro-/grammeertaal then?)
Results with
hyphens: manual;:
- All: (no breaks)
- PM: (no breaks); Ff, Chr, Saf: programmeer-/taal
- PM: (no breaks); Ff, Chr, Saf: programmeer-/taal
- All: programmeer-/taal
Chromium and Safari are willing to split a T-shirt, BTW.
https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_hyphens.php describes
hyphens: manual; as: "Default. Words are only hyphenated at ‐ or ­ (if needed)". I have a lot of thoughts now after this tiny investigation, but I'll just say: "All browsers are different."