Re: NBSP supposed to stretch, right?

From: Asmus Freytag via Unicode <unicode_at_unicode.org>
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2019 10:12:23 -0800

Asmus Freytag wrote,

> And any recommendation that is not compatible with what the overwhelming
> majority of software has been doing should be ignored (or only enabled on
> explicit user input).
>
> Otherwise, you'll just advocating for a massively breaking change.

It seems like the recommendations are already in place and the “overwhelming majority of software” is already disregarding them.

so they are dead letter and should be deprecated...

I don’t see the massively breaking change here.  Are there any illustrations?

If legacy text containing NON-BREAK SPACE characters is popped into a justifier, the worst thing that can happen is that the text will be correctly justified under a revised application.  That’s not breaking anything, it’s fixing it.  Unlike changing the font-face, font size, or page width (which often results in reformatting the text), the line breaks are calculated before justification occurs.

If a string of NON-BREAK SPACE characters appears in an HTML file, the browser should proportionally adjust all of those space characters identically with the “normal” space characters.  This should preserve the authorial intent.

As for pre-Unicode usage of NON-BREAK SPACE, were there ever any exlicit guidelines suggesting that the normal SPACE character should expand or contract for justification but that the NON-BREAK SPACE must not expand or contract?

Received on Wed Dec 18 2019 - 12:12:48 CST