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Frequently Asked Question | How To..

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WHY TO HYPHENATE THE WORLD WIDE WEB PAGES?

As the text hy­phen­a­tion, or syl­lab­i­fi­ca­tion, has been ex­ist­ing for cen­tu­ries in eve­ry kind of writ­ings, and prop­er hy­phen­a­tion is es­sen­tial for op­ti­mum read­a­bil­i­ty and get­ting a mes­sage a­cross, this is the lack­ing step to en­act the WWW as the lat­est ex­traor­di­nary re­cep­ta­cle and source of in­for­ma­tion and cul­ture.
An in­ev­i­ta­ble skep­ti­cism co­mes to sur­face from the fact that in the word pro­ces­sors the hy­phen­a­tion is au­to­mat­ic and we are not ac­cus­tomed to di­rect­ly face this prob­lem; for the hand writ­ing it was lim­it­ed the last word of eve­ry line, whilst the dy­nam­ic pag­i­nation of a Web text ex­tends the prob­lem to eve­ry pos­si­ble syl­la­ble. It may ap­pear triv­i­al, but this has been so far an in­sur­mount­a­ble prob­lem, for which are not seen yet Web doc­uments, even of cul­tur­al con­tents, made with pag­es re­spect­ful of the sec­u­lar ba­sis of the pub­lish­ing. Al­though get­ting used to the new look "as is", I guess that, more or less a­ware, we feel the a­bove lack lead­ing.
HOW MUCH DIFFICULT WILL BE THE MANUAL HYPHENATION?
HOW MUCH TIME WILL IT TAKE THIS TASK?

From now on, with the hy­phenator-Pro eve­ry­body can hy­phen­ate an en­tire do­main with a com­mand, keep­ing spe­cial pa­ram­e­ters for each file, if they were pre­viously set. You can in­ter­act with the web pag­es in var­i­ous ways, from to check the code in de­tail, step to step, to just set a glob­al or se­lec­tive com­mand to do that, even by a short­cut. Re­fer to the tu­to­ri­al fore­word for de­tails. When you need to edit a hy­phen­at­ed page click to un-hy­phen­ate it, then do what is need­ed; there­af­ter click to hy­phen­ate it a­gain.
THAT IS A LOT OF ­ !! HOW MUCH BIGGER IS THE WEBPAGE AFTER TOTAL HYPHENATION? Kat (Euphorum; Jul. 23, 2005)

There must be rea­sons for which this func­tion has not been im­ple­mented un­til now, but the Web pag­es lay­out in most cas­es is bad e­nough to re­quire ad­just­ment.
Your ques­tion may be set in two terms then:
  1. too many ­ make the doc­u­ment heav­i­er on the net
  2. too many ­ for to edit the doc­u­ment
(1) For the first, if you watch cer­tain pag­es au­to­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed by var­i­ous soft­wares you find such a re­dun­dan­cy of in­struc­tions as to make this prob­lem dis­ap­pear. The most typ­i­cal ex­am­ple is the thought­less re­pe­ti­tion of &nbsp; to o­ver­whelm white spaces, which could be de­fined by sim­ple <pre> </pre> with nor­mal white spaces in­side. An­oth­er is the use­less use of long tags, which most times could be re­placed by short­er ones; see <DIV></DIV> in­stead of <BR> and so on, for not to men­tion the in­den­ta­tion spaces left into the files.
(2) As to the se­cond, this is just the rea­son of my job: make the whole pro­cess "trans­par­ent", al­low­ing to hy­phen­ate the fin­ished page as well as to nor­mal­ize it be­fore any up­date, just with a click. In one op­tion­al ed­i­tor's view the hy­phen­ate sym­bol &shy; is re­placed by a mid-dot which let the text per­fect­ly read­a­ble to the user, who can see the hy­phen­at­ed HTML code with e­nough leg­i­ble mid­dots:
Hy·phen·a·tion in­stead of Hy&shy;phen&shy;a&shy;tion makes a lot of dif­fer­ence. The mat­ter is com­plex e­nough to show that pro­gram­ming is not only the as­sem­ble of ap­pro­pri­ate in­tructions, but the choice of prop­er ap­proach­es to fa­cil­i­tate the in­ter­ac­tions be­tween mind, fin­gers and eyes.

Fi­nal­ly, should this re­pres­ent a true prob­lem in spe­cial cas­es, sin­gle words or ar­e­as can be sub­jected to the [au­to­mat­ic] hy­phen­a­tion; or even the &shy; sym­bol can be re­placed by the prop­er "-" char­ac­ter (#AD = hy­phen, not the mi­nus sign #2D), which is rec­og­nized by most en­vi­ronments. The Rich­Ed­it for­mat it­self is able to han­dle it and, if you copy­/paste a text from an [Out­look] hy­phen­at­ed mail mes­sage, you will get these char­ac­ters too, pro­vid­ed that your ed­i­tor can show and will not hide them. The hy­phenator-Pro was built to man­age all those sit­u­ations.

Dear Antonio,
are you sure the hyphenation to be suitable and advantageous for the mail environment?
Wolf.

Since the pen was discovered (even if a lot of time after the hen) the man strived to distinguish himself by means of this new expression, the writing, that allowed to leave an enduring trace of himself. In this epoch in which the computer suddenly predominates, those traces have become so many that our problem is to eliminate them rather than to hand down to the posterity: although this could appear as the last word - and our letters are not kept in a pink ribbon anymore - the last word has never been said. I feel sure that nobody will want to definitely abdicate the elegance of his/her own expressiveness and the taste of the form, but that rather the time will sharpen the means of communication and transmission of the information, as it has always been, in spite of the momentary confusion resultant of an unprecedented acceleration. From this "new page" on, we might simply have to choose if to behave like human beings or bytes :o) .. just take your pick.


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  2006-Oct-01