Hard hyphen and HTML validation

[Stacy Pober]

Oops, correcting myself here.  I misspoke:  the line doesn't 
break at an & character. It breaks only with the hyphen or
the numeric character entity for the hyphen. 

As for substituting & for an ampersand, I doubt that would 
make me too happy.  It will make my pages validate without 
warnings, but it would also break a number of important links.

For example, the link to our online catalog is: 
http://www.waldo.msus.edu/cgi-bin/pals-cgi?palsAction=newSearch&setWeb=MCLCAT
On of our silverplatter databases is: 
http://webspirs.silverplatter.com:8000/waldo?sp.form.first.p=srchmain.htm&sp.dbid.p=S(WN)
and America: History and Life is:
http://serials.abc-clio.com/cgi-bin/nph-AppStart.py2.1?_appname=v3&initialdb=AH

We cannot substitute & for THOSE ampersands. 

So...as far as I can tell, any pages with those URLs are doomed to 
be 'invalid' as far as most validation services are concerned.

Best,
Stacy

Stacy Pober wrote:
> 
> I knew the character validates as &
> 
> However...
> 
> The problem is Internet Explorer feels it's proper to do a 'line
> break' at a hyphen or & character if the line length works out
> just right.
> 
> For example, if IE sees that the line length is up, it will break
> AFL-CIO
> into:
> AFL-
> CIO
> 
> I'm doing a simple text menu.  The menu has with short one or
> two word links. One of the links is a relatively short hyphenated
> word. I don't want the browser to break that one word onto two
> lines. I'm currently using the <nobr> html tag for this, and, while
> it causes validation errors, it works okay for all the browsers I've
> tried.
> 
> I know there must be all kinds of interesting ways to do menus that
> would get around this, but I don't want to do fancy stuff for this
> particular 'horizontal menu' of links.  It's for a simple,
> low-graphics site and I would prefer that it display with reasonable
> consistency in everything from v.3 browsers on up.
> 
> I just want this one hyphenated word to stay on ONE line.
> 
> Someone privately wrote to suggest using a style sheet for this:
> 
> <span style="white-space:nowrap;">Haagen-Dazs</span>
> 
> I'm considering doing that, but I'm curious which browsers it
> will NOT work in.
> 
> Thanks,
> Stacy
> 
> Robert Sullivan wrote:
> > > OTOH, I probably shouldn't worry too much about those validation
> > > errors.  I have come to the realization that some of our pages
> > > will *always* produce coding errors because of ampersands or
> > > other unusual characters that are a part of some of our database
> > > URL's.
> >
> > Actually, if you convert & to &amp; they validate properly.  (Thanks to
> > Web4Lib for informing me of this.)
> >
> > Bob Sullivan
> > Schenectady County Public Library (NY)  <http://www.scpl.org>

-- 
Stacy Pober
Information Alchemist
Manhattan College Libraries
Riverdale, NY 10471
http://www.manhattan.edu/library/