HTML soft hyphens now supported in Firefox 3

Kevin Yank (Sitepoint.com) wrote an interesting lesser known feature of Firefox3. I archive it here for my own documentation. The original article is here.

Tucked away in the list of CSS improvements in Firefox 3 is this innocuous-looking feature: “HTML soft hyphens (­) are now supported.”

Soft hyphens are one of those obscure gems that HTML has always supported on paper, but that no one has taken any notice of because browser support has been spotty. With the imminent release of Firefox 3, however, soft hyphens will be supported by all major browsers including Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera.

So, what is a soft hyphen, anyway?

A soft hyphen is a character of text that is usually invisible. It signals a spot in the text (usually in the middle of a long word) where it would be acceptable to break the line with a hyphen.

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