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Re: soft hyphens hard coded

for

From: wolfgang.berndorfer
Date: Jan 12, 2021 1:09AM

I try it again with an example:
Given the word *hyphenation*. These are the hyphenation points:
Hy¡Ephen¡Eation
A browser with an auto-hyphenation mechanism like Firefox would wrap at
these hyphenation points if the word wouldn¡¦t fit in the line as a whole.
I found no problems in pronunciation by any speech synthesizer, whether the
word was wrapped or not.

Imagine, there was an island called *hyphe*. Their inhabitants could be
called the hyphenation with the following hyphenation point:
Hyphe¡Enation
The library for auto-hyphenation in the browser has no exception for the
Hyphe-Nation. So, the author must manually code the hyphenation point in
HTML:
Hyphe­nation
The word is correctly wrapped visually and:
The word is correctly pronounced by speech synthesizers. (There should be a
small pause between *hyphe* and *nation* to hear the difference). I didn¡¦t
hear any aural problems for that usage. So, the pause is not a bug of
synthesizers.

Now, because not every browser uses auto-hyphenation yet, some authors hard
code the hyphenation points manually (probably using some tools to do so):
hy­phen­ation
No big problem for visual layout, except that the CSS *hyphens: manual*
setting shows more often hyphenations.
But it is a significant problem, when listening to the text. Just paste the
code in HTML and hear the difference with all that pauses.

So, if there was an auto-hyphenation in every browser, excessive manual
hyphenation could be deprecated.

Therefore, there should be a requirement for UA:
Provide auto-hyphenation.
And there should be a SC for authors:
Provide manual hyphenation only for meaningful differentiation.

Wolfgang