Bug 103048 – New &hy; entity for U+2010 HYPHEN

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: REMIND
• Component: Text

[Nicholas Shanks]

I would like to add a new entity to HTML, and having vendor buy-in is critical.

The entity is to represent U+2010 HYPHEN and my suggested entity for it is &hy; (since the soft hyphen is ­)
This is absolutely, critically, NOT to represent U+00AD HYPHEN MINUS, which I can type with a single keypress. At the moment I have to type ‐ every ten seconds, which is a pain (shift-7 option-3 alpha number number number number punct).

[Nicholas Shanks]

I received a bit of push-back against this from someone commenting on Mozilla's bug system: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814370
I think my counter-argument is sound and this enhancement request cannot be so easily dismissed.

[Glenn Adams]

Adding a named character entity, especially one which could introduce a fair amount of confusion, should not be driven by UA implementations unless there is widespread agreement between the implementers to do so *and* a reasonable attempt has been made to address the issue firstly in a standards forum. Since you don't provide any indication that you have proposed this to the W3C (I18N WG and HTML WG), and since there does not appear to be consensus with other browser vendors to do this, it would be inappropriate for WK to introduce this named entity.

I'm marking this as RESOLVED/REMIND until you do get widespread buy-in by the W3C and other vendors, in which case you may reopen this bug.