Re: lynx-dev Special Hyphen

[David Woolley]

> 
> My understanding is that ­ functions as a
> pseudo-word-boundary, for purposes of breaking lines too long for
> the screen width, thus avoiding a short line before a long word

You are confusing it with a zero width space.  ­ becomes a real
hyphen, not just non-zero length white space, if broken on.

As far as I know, unlike zero length space, HTML gives no semantics
rules for ­, and they are really a character set issue.  SGML
certainly has nothing to do with them.

In the PRE case quoted, I would say the only reasonable renderings are
to ignore them completely, or display a substitute character (the
Postscript font .notdef character).  The substitute case is for when
the user agent doesn't support that character.