Using the shy soft hyphen in HTML

The other day I created a cool example using the <wbr> HTML tag. And although its a very cool tag on it's own.

There might be a better solution.

We can use &shy this is a soft hyphen in HTML.

It means that it will add a - if the word is too long, else it will just render the word as is.

I'll be using my <wbr> demo to now also add the shy as an option.

How the ­ works

You can basically place the ­ in a word, in places where you want it to enter a soft hyphen when the word is too long for its container.

super­long­word­that­needs­to­break­better

As you can see, the implementation is the same as we saw with <wbr> however, this not an HTML element but an entity.

Demo

In the following demo, I've demonstrated three methods:

• shy: using the ­ in the word
• wbr: using the <wbr> in the word
• css: using word-break in css.

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Comments

[Alex Lohr]

There's another interesting standard here: developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/Web/... - unfortunately, there's no support from Chrome for other languages than English.

[Chris Bongers]

Yes was looking at that one icw word-break, but found that the support is laggy and you won't have the option to specify your breaks.