Has it frozen?

I’ve always thought that hell would freeze over before I’d have something positive to say about IE which at the same time is a lack in Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, Galeon, Epiphany, etc.) But, here goes. The work website (still under development and not yet public) has a menu with lengthy titles. The problem is that Finnish, like many other languages, but unlike English, has long words with many characters. Trying to create a menu in the sidebar with limited space requires hyphenation even with small font sizes, let alone larger ones.

The HTML (4.01) and XHTML standards define the entity ­ (or ­) as a soft hyphen that may be used to give hyphenation hints to browsers. A nice solution to my problem, or so I thought. But, testing the solution with Firefox didn’t do a thing. I still had overflowing list items. But, surprise, surprise IE worked like a charm. Digging around the Mozilla Bugzilla led me to bug 9101 which quite clearly states that Gecko-based browsers completely ignore the soft hyphen. And the bug has been known for five years or so by now. I’m sorry to say, but even IE does it better.

2 thoughts on “Has it frozen?

  1. Kokeilepa WBR -tagia (ei tarvitse sulkevaa elementtia). Käytän sitä omassa kävijäseurannassa jossa näkyy todella pitkiä urleja. On toiminut sekä firefoxissa että operassa linuxilla.

  2. Hmm… Mutta kun se WBR-tagi ei kuulu standardiin. Ja minäkin kun pidän kiinni standardin noudattamisesta. Olin kyllä siitä muutenkin tietoinen, mutta ei käy tässä tapauksessa.

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