Sent by Jukka K. Korpela on 24 February 2005 07:07
On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 [EMAIL-REMOVED] wrote:
> For browsers that can properly present Unicode characters -- Opera and
> Firefox appear to do so, I'd imagine Safari does as well -- you can also
> use a zero-width space (​) between each character where a split would
> occur.
But this requires the insertion of the character reference, or the
character itself (when using a suitable encoding like UTF-8), between
every two digits, in this case. It sounds less practical than inserting
<wbr>, which works more widely.
> On IE, however, (in the U.S., at least) this appears as one of those
> ugly "missing character glyph" rectangles,
This depends on the font in use. You could set
font-family: Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode;
for the element containing the string. This would probably fix that
problem, though it is not absolutely certain that all versions of those
fonts contain the zero-width space glyph. However then you would get the
digits in one of those fonts as well. If you wrapped each instance of the
zero-width space inside a <span> and specified the font for the <span>,
the data would get really awkward.
> using a standard space character and decreasing the letter
> spacing might do better.
But then the data would appear as space-separated digits in any non-CSS
presentation. Moreover, there's really no way to know how much the spacing
should be decreased. Even though digits have the same width in most fonts
used on computers, there is no CSS unit corresponding to that width.
By tuning the value to suit a particular font, you might get it mostly
right in most situations - but it would fail when your font suggestion is
overridden, for one reason or another.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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