in reply to Re: A call to keyboards: Better chatterbox wrapping
in thread A call to keyboards: Better chatterbox wrapping

Even simpler: just insert <span></span> into long words. The browser will wrap there, but copy-paste will retrieve the text verbatim. That'll work on every browser in every circumstance.

Actually, I would advocate inserting &shy; entities (“soft hyphen”), which indicate wrap points and are only rendered when the browser actually has to wrap. Unfortunately, they currently only work as intended in IE, AFAIK.

In general, I share your view that this is problem is being solved on the wrong level. I'm not sure there's much choice in this particular case, though.

Makeshifts last the longest.

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Re^3: A call to keyboards: Better chatterbox wrapping
by Juerd (Abbot) on Jan 10, 2005 at 20:46 UTC

    Even simpler: just insert into long words. The browser will wrap there, but copy-paste will retrieve the text verbatim. That'll work on every browser in every circumstance.

    Oh, wow. That sounds like a more useful alternative than the space thing. Too bad it still requires the ugly hack. Still, much better than insterting spaces indeed. Wouldn't <b></b> be better, bandwidth-wise? It's an inline level tag, like span.

    It'd be great if all browsers really understood XHTML as XML, because then you could just use <span/> or <b/>.

    Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

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      Didn't think of those, since I never use <b> or <i>. But semantically they're as void as <span>, so why not.

      Makeshifts last the longest.

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        Why would a browser wrap at <b></b> ?? Neither IE nor FireFox do that for me. I'd be quite surprised at a browser that did such. They don't fold a <span></span> either.

        - tye        

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