Sent by Jukka K. Korpela on 12 September 2004 17:05
On Sun, 12 Sep 2004, David Leader wrote:
> 2. Is there anything in the html spec that suggests browsers should
> wrap at forward slashes (my word processor doesn't), or is that a
> decision they've made 'off their own bat' to handle urls?
I'm afraid the question is basically off-topic (since it's about HTML with
no direct implication on CSS), but briefly: Not really; it's basically a
Unicode business. And it's not related to handling URLs in any particular
way. Browsers are partly applying Unicode line breaking rules these days;
and those rules are a really messy issue, see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/unicode/linebr.html
The classical approach in HTML (as defined in HTML 2.0) was based on the
idea of breaking at white space only, and possibly after hyphens.
This reflected the properties of some scripts and isn't sufficient
across writing systems. But effectively browser behavior was changed, due
to the Unicode line breaking rules, with no change in any HTML or CSS
specifications, and without documenting it in public.
I just realized that the CSS specification leaves it completely open how
browsers break lines when white-space: normal is applied:
"This value directs user agents to collapse sequences of whitespace, and
break lines as necessary to fill line boxes."
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/text.html#propdef-white-space
So it does not say that browsers should break at white space as needed, as
I've always understood what was _meant_ here (and probably really was).
It defines that white-space: normal means two completely different things,
namely white space collapse and breaking lines (by some unspecified
rules). Thus, CSS specifications do not really take any position on how
lines might get broken in normal (white-space: normal) situations.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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