On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 11:02:38PM -0300, bulia byak wrote:
Inserting a space between joined words will do the wrong thing for URLs,
An URL broken across lines is broken already.
No it isn't. A URL broken across a line is much better than a URL off the edge of the page. There are standards saying how URLs should be split across lines (namely without using a hyphen) and similarly that URL recognizers (e.g. mail agents that auto-markup URLs) should accept such split URLs.
However, I was just thinking when walking to the office that given that URIs are computer-recognizable, we can treat them specially if we want to for purposes of line breaking and rejoining.
Handling URIs doesn't fix the problem in general, but there's still some value in making the problem rarer.
hyphenated words
These could only be hyphenated manually, and therefore can be expected to be dehyphenated also manually. Adding or not adding a space matters less than the manual hard hyphen which stays anyway.
True for a long word that has a hyphen inserted to break the line at that point, but not true for phrases with hyphens ("computer-recognizable").
Also mostly true if one follows the OED practice of writing "computer- -recognizable" (i.e. having a hyphen at the beginning of the next line if one splits a hyphenated phrase at the hyphen).
- "Unix hacker's approach": Don't insert spaces. The user will compensate,
Manually removing unneeded spaces if we insert them will likely be much less frequent than adding them if we don't.
Agreed.
Let's not overengineer this simple command until spaces really become a problem.
The "Unix hacker's approach" involves least engineering.
What do you mean by "become a problem" (used both here and in context of chinese) ? It is immediately a problem in the software; it becomes a practical problem once someone uses the relevant bit of code. We may or may not receive a bug report, though that can be used as a test of annoyingness.
pjrm.