[thelist] Tip of the Moment: wrapping long words in short di vs

Tue Feb 10 15:42:13 CST 2004

> Jacques Capesius wrote:
> <cut>
>> <tip type="Wrapping Long Words" author="Jacques Capesius">
>> 
>> Use an HTML 4.0 "Small Hyphen" (&#173;) to force a line break when
>> the word is too long to fit within the horizontal confines of its
>> containing <div> or <td>, etc. 
>> 

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Brian W. Reaves asked:
> I wonder if you can do this with long eMail addresses or URI's?
> 

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To answer your question, I popped the the following HTML in an html page and
tried it in IE and Mozilla:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<HEAD><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=utf-8"></head>
<html>
	<a href="http://www.ya&#173;hoo.com">
		http://www.ya&#173;hoo.com
	</a>
	<a href="mailto:jacques&#173;_capesius at cnt.com">
		mail jacques&#173;_capesius at cnt.com
	</a>
</html>

The display ommitted the hyphens, but they showed up in the URI address and
the email address. However, when outlook was launched, the hyphen went away.
Still, I guess the answer would be no, if the uri and/or email address is
part of an html element attribute. 

I assume this is because the purpose of the small hyphen is to govern the
display behavior of content, without regard to attribute behavior.

Hope this answers your question.

-jacques :)