(1) Browser layout engines are pretty messed up, and adding a bunch of shy hyphens can lead to really weird layout issues. I wish I had some good examples, but basically it has to do with taking into account the amount of space a hyphen takes up, and using that to compute how long lines should be, but then when the hyphens are in the middle of the line, not showing them. Anyway, as I remember sometimes it can result in text being eaten (i.e. not shown properly).
In other words, I’d try to do specific testing in a bunch of browsers, resizing a window through all reasonable sizes it might be, before counting on shy hyphens to work properly.
(2) This is still going to break search within pages. Pretty stupid that browsers can’t do proper search, but so it goes.
(3) This is going to be effectively a line-by-line paragraph composer, because browsers don’t do any kind of real paragraph layout. And it still won’t do any adjustment of inter-letter space. The combination of these two things means that using justified text is going to still usually end up looking like crap. Better than without any hyphenation, but not all that much better.
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In short, this is kind of a half-way stopover workaround for the absolutely stupid lack of real hyphenation and justification algorithms in current browsers. Absolutely stupid because this is a solved problem: the algorithm used by TeX and described in one of Knuth’s students in the late 70s works pretty darn well (Adobe uses a modified version for InDesign), and on modern hardware should be perfectly reasonably fast, as well.
It’s not quite as bad as the lack of real layout in Microsoft Word, given that laying out text is the only purpose of that application, but still.... pretty bad.
(1) Browser layout engines are pretty messed up, and adding a bunch of shy hyphens can lead to really weird layout issues. I wish I had some good examples, but basically it has to do with taking into account the amount of space a hyphen takes up, and using that to compute how long lines should be, but then when the hyphens are in the middle of the line, not showing them. Anyway, as I remember sometimes it can result in text being eaten (i.e. not shown properly).
In other words, I’d try to do specific testing in a bunch of browsers, resizing a window through all reasonable sizes it might be, before counting on shy hyphens to work properly.
(2) This is still going to break search within pages. Pretty stupid that browsers can’t do proper search, but so it goes.
(3) This is going to be effectively a line-by-line paragraph composer, because browsers don’t do any kind of real paragraph layout. And it still won’t do any adjustment of inter-letter space. The combination of these two things means that using justified text is going to still usually end up looking like crap. Better than without any hyphenation, but not all that much better.
----
In short, this is kind of a half-way stopover workaround for the absolutely stupid lack of real hyphenation and justification algorithms in current browsers. Absolutely stupid because this is a solved problem: the algorithm used by TeX and described in one of Knuth’s students in the late 70s works pretty darn well (Adobe uses a modified version for InDesign), and on modern hardware should be perfectly reasonably fast, as well.
It’s not quite as bad as the lack of real layout in Microsoft Word, given that laying out text is the only purpose of that application, but still.... pretty bad.