[[!tag wishlist]]

I recently found [Hyphenator](http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/) which is quite cool ... but it should be possible to implement this functionality within ikiwiki and not rely on javascript and the client.

A Perl implementation of the algorithm exists in [[!cpan TeX::Hyphen]].

> I'd be inclined to say that Javascript run in the client is a better
> place to do hyphenation: this is the sort of non-essential,
> progressive-enhancement thing that JS is perfect for. If you did it
> at the server side, to cope with browser windows of different sizes
> you'd have to serve HTML sprinkled with soft-hyphen entities at
> every possible hyphenation point, like
>
>     pro&shy;gress&shy;ive en&shy;hance&shy;ment
>
> which is nearly twice the byte-count and might stop
> search engines from indexing your site correctly.
>
> A browser that supports Javascript probably also supports
> soft-hyphen marks, but I doubt all non-JS browsers support them
> correctly.
>
> It might be good to have a plugin to insert a reference to the
> hyphenation JS into the `<head>`, or a general way to enable
> this sort of thing without writing a plugin or changing your
> `page.tmpl`, though. Perhaps we should have a `local.js`
> alongside `local.css`? :-)
>
> --[[smcv]]

>> Thanks, I did not realize that the javascript does something else than add &amp;shy;s - took a closer look at it now.
>> I doubt however that adding them will increase the byte count more than transmitting the javascript.
