[thelist] Opposite of nowrap

Sam-I-Am sam at sam-i-am.com
Wed Dec 17 10:09:30 CST 2003


Diane Soini wrote:
> There are various methods to specify a nowrap property on text. Is there 
> the opposite? I have a form that retrieves results and sometimes there 
> are things like URLs that are way too long for the space and it breaks 
> the layout. I'd like the text to break anywhere it needs to so it will 
> fit. Or at the very least, specify it's ok to break on other non-letter 
> characters besides the hyphen.

The <wbr> tag was supposed to do something like this. It was used in the 
context of <nobr></nobr> to indicate where the text *could* wrap. But 
it's long gone from the html spec, with no replacement. Netscape dropped 
support as of v6 (via gecko).

See:
http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/tagpages/w/wbr.htm

and I've had a test page up at:
http://www.sam-i-am.com/work/sandbox/html/wbr.html

that I recently updated to test this case. Actually it appears to work 
in IE (pc), and Mozilla too (I wonder why?) - it will certainly not 
validate though.

hth
Sam



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