I agree with the author I think. Or this is what I would use for the semantics:
- A soft hyphen is meant to represent a line-break opportunity
- When transforming text for layout, the soft hyphen can be removed or inserted depending on where it would appear
- Ignore when searching text
- It is similar to single linebreaks in MarkDown: they will be stripped in some output formats
- Language-specific concerns (see Swedish) are not considered
The list above is incomplete.
I feel that all the links are too abstract. Here is a concrete example:
A program for inserting linebreaks in a paragraph. The soft hyphen can be used at the end of line to indicate: if you rerun this program you may remove this soft hyphen because it’s not part of the word.
Now you have a character which covers one of the following:
- Hyphen that is a linebreak opportunity
- Hyphen that is not a linebreak opportunity (e.g. in “word- and paragraph-boundaries”: “word-” should not be a linebreak opportunity because you don’t want to put that back as “word-and”)
- Hyphen at the end of the line which was not in the original word (soft hyphen)
- A soft hyphen is meant to represent a line-break opportunity
- When transforming text for layout, the soft hyphen can be removed or inserted depending on where it would appear
- Ignore when searching text
- It is similar to single linebreaks in MarkDown: they will be stripped in some output formats
- Language-specific concerns (see Swedish) are not considered
The list above is incomplete.
I feel that all the links are too abstract. Here is a concrete example:
A program for inserting linebreaks in a paragraph. The soft hyphen can be used at the end of line to indicate: if you rerun this program you may remove this soft hyphen because it’s not part of the word.
Now you have a character which covers one of the following:
- Hyphen that is a linebreak opportunity
- Hyphen that is not a linebreak opportunity (e.g. in “word- and paragraph-boundaries”: “word-” should not be a linebreak opportunity because you don’t want to put that back as “word-and”)
- Hyphen at the end of the line which was not in the original word (soft hyphen)