September 10, 2025 at 5:31:27 PM UTC

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TIL `hyphens: auto` does not add hyphens for capitalized words (in English at least).

extraordinarily (wraps with hyphen)
Extraordinarily (no wrap no hyphen)

Adding `word-break: break-word` breaks the capitalized word, but still no hyphen 🤨

Demo (applies to Firefox and Chrome, working in Safari): https://codepen.io/zachleat/pen/myeYbJV

14 replies

Alan Stearns 6 min later

@zachleat It’s allowed but not required per spec. Safari does hyphenate the capitalized word
1. Zach Leatherman 8 min later
  
  @famulimas yeah, I noticed that! I think Safari’s behavior is more predictable here, fwiw
Dan Burzo 6 min later

@zachleat Yeah, kind of a bummer, as it doesn’t distinguish between words that are capitalized mid-sentence (probably proper nouns) and words that are capitalized because they start a sentence…
1. Zach Leatherman 9 min later
  
  @db I see your point, yeah! That they distinguish based on capitalization seems odd to me
Harris Lapiroff 9 min later

@zachleat Finding bugs in the text layout engine always feels like a special nerdy treat.
1. Zach Leatherman 11 min later
  
  @harris I don’t think this is a bug (fwiw) but maybe an intentional choice, per https://front-end.social/@famulimas/115181215027069621
  but it was a fun one to learn!
Nathan Knowler 15 min later

@zachleat yes, this is language dependant. Each browser has hyphenation dictionaries for various languages. In German, you’ll notice that there is hyphenation for capitalized words. This would actually be a very good Interop issue.
I’ve got some demos I made in the past for this…
With English: https://knowler.dev/demos/tp0-gpS?codepen
With a German word: https://knowler.dev/demos/idITprB?codepen
1. Zach Leatherman 17 min later
  
  @knowler oh great test cases! I noticed the same behavior in English for dictionary words and gibberish too 🤔
  1. Nathan Knowler 22 min later
    
    @zachleat It gets interesting when you combine `hyphens: auto` and `word-break` haha: https://sunny.garden/@knowler/113964937944456245
    1. Zach Leatherman 51 min later
      
      @knowler seeing some breaks with hyphens and some not (on the same word) is BOTHERING ME 😅
2. Nathan Knowler 18 min later
  
  @zachleat A good place to start could be making some WPTs for this, but I imagine that, like @famulimas notes, since it’s not required by the spec, it might not be accepted. I personally would expect Safari’s behaviour to be correct. I’ve ventured into some browser codebases to see if I could fix this, but I think it could be dependency related.
Timo Tijhof 1 day later

@zachleat
A pet peeve of mine is that #NetNewsWire, my feed reader which I otherwise love, breaks article titles rather aggressively with hyphens.
This means you get headlines like:
> They Could Not Believe Al-
> pacas Had It All.
Which is not about Artificial Intelligence-made pacas, but about Alpacas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paca
1. Zach Leatherman 1 day later
  
  @krinkle Huh… a choice they made or a browser quirk?
  1. Timo Tijhof 2 days later
    
    @zachleat
    I believe the headline is outside the webview, so it's a choice they made in writing the ObjC/Swift UI (or someone at Apple made the choice, for them).