No, we don't want to s/-/‑/g for everybody, as some people have environments where that character doesn't render properly (the Wii browser for one, it seems).

Frankly, most people don't have this problem because they are used to the age of CSS when at least a near majority of web pages are at least inconvenient to read if you don't maximize your browser and also have a fairly modern-sized monitor.

I find that most computer users I meet either only use maximized windows or hardly ever use maximized windows. The latter group is in the minority but counts me as a member. So I find myself constantly disabling CSS just so I can frickin' read the dang text on a stupid web page.

So I likely have my browser window about 1/2 the width of the majority of people and so I see wrapped text in tables at PerlMonks more than most.

So, the few of us who actually still make use of a windowing system should be enabled to set our 'shorttimeformat' to "%Y&#8209;%m&#8209;%d&nbsp;%H:%M" or "<nobr>%Y-%m-%d %H:%M</nobr>" but then have that transformed into something for the non-HTML contexts (like 'title' attributes), perhaps via things like s/&#8209;/-/g and s/&nbsp;/ /g and s/<[^>]+>//g. So we need to teach the code to ask for an HTML compact date or a text compact date.

But probably better would be to allow for each time format to specify separate formats for HTML vs. text. I'd probably just stuff that into the existing format settings. I'd be tempted to use "</html>" as the separator so we don't have allow for escaping the separator. For example, "<nobr>%Y-%m-%d&#x1F551;%H:%M</nobr></html>%Y-%m-%d %H:%M".