[Zope3-dev] Links styling

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

Steve Alexander writes:
 > In HTML there is the entity   for a non-breaking space. Is there an 
 > entity for a breaking-non-space ? If so, this could be inserted between 
 > path sections.

Not really.

HTML 4.01 (and some earlier versions; I haven't tracked down which)
defines ‌ this way:

<!ENTITY zwnj    CDATA "&#8204;" -- zero width non-joiner,
                                    U+200C NEW RFC 2070 -->

This is taken from:

    http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/sgml/entities.html#h-24.4.1

RFC 2070 explains this a bit, in section 4.2.2:

    http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2070.html

"""
   A set of named character entities is added for use with bidirectional
   rendering and cursive joining control:

   <!ENTITY zwnj CDATA "&#8204;"--=zero width non-joiner-->
   <!ENTITY zwj  CDATA "&#8205;"--=zero width joiner-->
   <!ENTITY lrm  CDATA "&#8206;"--=left-to-right mark-->
   <!ENTITY rlm  CDATA "&#8207;"--=right-to-left mark-->

   These entities can be used in place of the corresponding formatting
   characters whenever convenient, for example to ease keyboard entry or
   when a formatting character is not available in the character
   encoding of the document.
"""

I didn't see anything else about the zero-width joiner and non-joiner
characters specifically in this section, but section 4.2.3 explains
those a bit more; they're really there to control the output of
character joining algorithms such as might be expected for scripts
such as Arabic, where the joining of adjacent characters is
important.

So these aren't really what you want; they don't control how wrapping
is done, but how characters are joined together.

On the other hand, some browsers might allow wrapping at a "thin
space":

<!ENTITY thinsp  CDATA "&#8201;" -- thin space, U+2009 ISOpub -->


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fred at zope.com>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation