Bug 197889 - Don’t hyphenate proper nouns in English
Summary: Don’t hyphenate proper nouns in English
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: WebKit
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Text (show other bugs)
Version: WebKit Nightly Build
Hardware: All All
: P2 Minor
Assignee: Nobody
URL:
Keywords: BrowserCompat, InRadar
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2019-05-14 11:34 PDT by Justin McDowell
Modified: 2019-07-09 17:26 PDT (History)
7 users (show)

See Also:


Attachments
Reduced test case. (3.39 KB, text/html)
2019-05-14 11:34 PDT, Justin McDowell
no flags Details

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Description Justin McDowell 2019-05-14 11:34:58 PDT
Created attachment 369874 [details]
Reduced test case.

Steps to reproduce the problem: In CSS, set `-webkit-hyphens: auto;`.

What is the expected behavior?
Proper nouns, i.e. names, in English should never be hyphenated. If, for some reason, they do need to be hyphenated, that should be the edge case, not the other way around.

What went wrong?
Proper nouns get hyphenated. See the reduced test case.

Did this work before? No 

Does this work in other browsers? No
Chrome has the same problem: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=963039&can=2&q=hyphen%20proper%20nouns
Firefox currently has the same problem, but has opted to fix it by not hyphenating capitalized words (based on language; languages like German would still hyphenate capitalized words by default). This fix will be coming in Firefox 68: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1550532
Unsure about Edge, but Edge is now using Blink, so I expect it will be the same as Chrome.

Hyphen support is uniformly bad across all browsers, but they should be progressive enhancements. As it stands, turning on hyphens degrades the quality of the content and hyphenating proper nouns is the primary reason for that.
Comment 1 Myles C. Maxfield 2019-05-14 11:43:04 PDT
https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/3927
Comment 2 Radar WebKit Bug Importer 2019-05-15 14:29:26 PDT
<rdar://problem/50826531>
Comment 3 Justin McDowell 2019-07-09 17:16:48 PDT
This issue has been addressed in Firefox 68. It no longer hyphenates capitalized words.