Yoz Grahame's Cheerleader: A crap fix for a crap bug (Soft hyphens in Mozilla)

January 18, 2005

A crap fix for a crap bug (Soft hyphens in Mozilla)

Here's something that you probably didn't know (it was certainly news to me): Mozilla's HTML 4.0 support is lacking. Some go as far as saying it's not fully compliant. It's always been like this; even worse, in this particular area, IE's support is just fine. It's just the kind of standards-conformance problem that designers should be screaming about, yet there's mostly an eerie silence on the topic.

It's all to do with the rendering of one particular character: Latin-1 codepoint 173, a.k.a. Unicode 00AD, a.k.a. , a.k.a. the soft hyphen. It's a remarkably-useful byte, the purpose of which is to hyphenate words only when they've run over the margin. In other words, if you have a long word which you'd like to be able to split over two lines, but only if that split needs to happen, then placing a  at your desired splitting-point should tell the text-rendering code that it's got some flexibility in the matter, and everyone's happy.

See here for browser-specific examples: IE6 renders soft hyphens correctly, as does Opera. Safari didn't, but Dave Hyatt took the required hour or so to fix it a year ago. So where the hell is Mozilla?

I have to thank Jude for highlighting this one and infecting me with the kind of mystified annoyance common to this topic (as shown by comments on the bug in question, half of which echo the "it's been five bloody years!" theme).

Anyway, here's a fix. It's a portable fix, in that you can just attach some Javascript to a page and all the soft hyphens in that page will be rendered properly (at least, it's worked through the minimal testing I've done). At present it only works when the soft hyphens are surrounded by letters matched by the RegExp metacharacter \w - this is bad, as most of the people who really need soft hyphen support are those using foreign languages with really long words, such as Danish and German, and they have extra letter chars that \w doesn't match. (Any patches to the matching regexp will be gratefully received and incorporated, if and when I get around to it)

However, I don't really recommend using this technique, because it's a nasty stupid kludge that probably took me longer to code than it would to just bloody fix Mozilla, and I'm hoping that this half-assed implementation will finally prompt someone who can make the fix ('cos I can't) to actually do it.

Posted by Yoz at January 18, 2005 02:33 AM | TrackBack

Comments

I love how everyone bitches about how amazingly easy this would be for someone *else* to fix.

Posted by: Kim Scarborough on January 18, 2005 03:11 AM

We bitch because, if you look at the Bugzilla comments, several people who actually know about Gecko internals *agree* that it's easy. They just haven't done it. Do you have an extra insight into the difficulty that you could share?

And the reason I can't fix it is because (a) my C++ are practically non-existent these days and (b) I have no experience with Gecko source code, and the internals of an HTML rendering engine are not such that one can tinker easily.

Posted by: Yoz on January 18, 2005 03:24 AM

I'm just sick of everybody whining for somebody else to fix it. I'm sure if you're unhappy with Mozilla, your money will be cheerfully refunded.

Making snotty blog posts like this is not the way to encourage people to fix things. Your whole tone sounds like you feel that the coders owe you something, and that they're shirking by not providing it. Who wants to hear that?

Posted by: Kim Scarborough on January 18, 2005 03:53 AM

Uh oh, someone switched my ranty bit.

Kim: if you actually want open source software to work, lay off the "it doesn't cost anything, you should be grateful, *patches* *welcome*" schtick. You think my mother should be delving into code to fix things? That Firefox will succeed in getting market share if it has bugs that IE doesn't? Do you think Yoz *wants* to have to use IE?

"Snotty blog posts" aren't the best way of dealing with things, but when there's a vast Bugzilla ticket with comments attached to it already, and when there's, as Yoz says, a feeling that people could do it, but just haven't, what better way would you suggest of bringing attention to the issue?

I'd certainly never heard of it, and that's probably because I, like Kim, and like Yoz (primarily), communicate in English, which doesn't really need soft hyphens. Perhaps if you talked to more Germans you'd accept that this isn't just a tickbox on a compatibility sheet, but something that screws up the way the web works for them. So thanks, Yoz and Jude, for highlighting this one.

Posted by: paul mison on January 18, 2005 08:40 AM

Making snotty blog posts like this is not the way to encourage people to fix things.

Ooh, stick you.

Frankly, Mozilla ought to do better, just because we've thrown shitloads of advocacy in their direction, for which we're not demanding a refund.

Your whole tone sounds like you feel that the coders owe you something

Yes, they do. When we plead the case for installing Mozilla-based browsers in office environments, or to ensure that projects coded with IE in mind don't break for Firefox users, we're presuming that the Mozilla coders keep their end of the bargain. So please take your hauteur and jam it right up your arse.

(I notice that you're not busily coding away at your CSS wishlist... shouldn't that be keeping you occupied?)

Posted by: nick on January 18, 2005 08:48 AM

Oh, and turn HTML on, FFS, Yoz. Or at least tell us it won't work before we post comments. Sheesh.

Posted by: nick on January 18, 2005 09:06 AM

Oh yeah, a bunch of unpaid coders should immediately address your concerns because you've paid them in "advocacy"... and you'll whine if you don't get what you want.

I hate to break it to you, but you have no "bargain" with the Mozilla coders. That's a load of crap.

Anyway, you're missing the point. There's nothing wrong with arguing that features need to be included in Mozilla, just like there's nothing wrong with arguing that particular features need to be included in CSS. I'm cc'd on that soft-hyphen bug; obviously I want it fixed too. It's just this endless crybaby crap that's really getting on my nerves. It's just a browser. Get a grip.

Posted by: Kim Scarborough on January 18, 2005 07:03 PM

"a bunch of unpaid coders should immediately address your concerns"

Strawmantastic. When was that bug first reported again?

Posted by: nick on January 19, 2005 08:53 AM

Hey. I'm one of those people who needs this & shy ; tag very often (estonian has lots of long words) and it really is THE most annoying thing about Firefox. Have a look and find out why.

And I think highlighting the problem is important, because it's just plain idiotic that FF does not have such a feature.

Posted by: Haikala on January 20, 2005 08:53 AM

"It's just this endless crybaby crap that's really getting on my nerves. It's just a browser. Get a grip."

If dealing with browser support issues is part of your daily professional work, then the issue is not "just a browser". No one's being a crybaby; I believe there have been sufficient years (!) of reasonable pointing-out-the-missing-easy-feature to wear anyone's patience a bit thin.

Posted by: Nelson Menezes on January 24, 2005 11:55 AM

Maybe...

And this is from somebody who just found this site randomly surfing and already forgot how. :)

That the 'bug' is NOT an easy fix for the people who claim it to be so. If it were they probably would fix it. Lots of things could be 'easy' but take hours and some people might be too lazy to do it. Also, claims of being easy on a developer forum/post is often times just the poster trying to look '133t' and saying something that is actually HARD is ... EASY so they get to look like super coders...I've seen that happen before too usually on usenet :)

Just my random .02¢

Posted by: Alyssa on February 6, 2005 09:45 PM

I just want to thank Yoz for providing his "crappy" fix, which helped me to complete a brand new web site that I really wanted to look good in all browsers - including Mozilla :)

As far as I am concerned Yoz has every right to be snotty, since he provided a nice workaround for what otherwise would have been an incorrectable problem to me. And the solution was there right when I needed it, I started developing in January 2005!

I do agree however that people should not bitch about browser bugs, but simply learn to live with them. All browsers have bugs, as do all other non-trivial software products. Firefox just has _different_ bugs from IE, but as long as I can code so that my work looks as I intended it in both (and I test with Opera too ;)), I don't mind much.

Posted by: Berend Engelbrecht on February 14, 2005 12:39 AM

I found a little bug. The script checks if a linebreak is needed while having the "- "s influencing the text. Changing lines 106 to 110 in the shy.js does fix this. eg replace it by the following:

temp = shys[i].style.display;
shys[i].style.display = "none";
if (shys[i].next.offsetTop != shys[i].prev.offsetTop)
{

shys[i].style.display = temp;
}

Beware of that I didn't debug that fix a lot, just quickly noticed that it works for me...

Finally: Thx to Yoz for creating the script :).

Posted by: Chris on July 8, 2005 03:57 PM

Seems like my last fix was not working and I had some real problems to find a working one, which may be caused by my little javascript knowledge. Finally I found a compromise that uses the -tag internally which is supported by firefox.
Forget my last description and change the following to the code of shy.js version 1.0 by Yoz:

// between line 79 and line 80 add:
this.id = n;

//change line 95 to:
shys[i].style.display = "inline";

// add after line 95:
document.getElementById("shy"+shys[i].id).innerHTML = '';

//add after line 109:
}else{
document.getElementById("shy"+shys[i].id).innerHTML = '- ';
if (shys[i].next.offsetTop == shys[i].prev.offsetTop)
{
shys[i].style.display = "none";
}

I hope I didn't mix up line numbers and didn't forget a change.

This is a solution works much more (in fact most) accurate in determing if a wordbreak is needed. Does anyone see how to get rid of the usage of the tag? Suggestions to nospam@cvogt.org please.

Furthermore a little hint for inclusion of shy.js in an "xhtml 1.0 strict"-compatible way:
[...]

window.onresize = shyreflow;

[...]

Posted by: Chris on July 10, 2005 12:03 AM

*grmbl*... this blog stripped the html tags from my code... write an email if you need the correct code or inclusion hint...

Posted by: Chris on July 10, 2005 11:48 AM

Bother, sorry about that, Chris - I really should work out how to fix that.
Want to mail me the patch and I'll put it in myself?

Posted by: Yoz on July 10, 2005 05:54 PM