WebKit Hyphenation

Question

Has anyone successfully been able to implement hyphenation in any of the WebKit browsers? I've tried the CSS3 hyphenation style as well as -webkit-hyphens: auto. No dice for either of those. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Note: I've only tried Safari and Chrome on a Mac.

Update: Code example

<html>
  <head>
    <style>
      div {
        -webkit-hyphens: auto;
      }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
     <div style="width: 150px; border: solid 1px black;">
       <p>Anaideia, spirit of ruthlessness, shamelessness, and unforgivingness</p>
       <p>Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Antidisestablishmentarianism, Floccinaucinihilipilification, Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia</p>
     </div>
  </body>
</html>

Where are you trying to implement them, can you give us the text you are using for example? — Myles Gray, Mar 18 '11 at 19:17
Here's a link to that code (with webkit spelt correctly :) ) http://jsbin.com/ihama4/2/ — Rich Bradshaw, Mar 18 '11 at 21:19
How did you come up with those long words? I only ever heard the first one before. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious — 700 Software, Mar 18 '11 at 21:29
Works on my iPhone perfectly! Exactly what I was looking for. -- Also updated my spelling mistake ;) -- Cheers. — dandax, Mar 18 '11 at 21:29
@George Bailey: Good ol' Wikipedia. Just searched for "longest words". I wish I could say they were off the top of my head... — dandax, Mar 18 '11 at 21:32

Rich Bradshaw · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-18T21:23:18.550

26

-webkit-hyphens works fine on iOS 4.2 and above, and is partially supported in the webkit nightlies.

Webkit:

Webkit

iOS 4.3:

iOS 4.3

edited Mar 18 '11 at 21:23

answered Mar 18 '11 at 21:15

Rich Bradshaw

71,795
44
182
241

Why, both Safari 9 on desktop and on iOS 9 still uses the -webkit- prefix, other browsers are also unprefixed. – Rich Bradshaw Jun 15 '15 at 15:44

nachomaans · Answer 2 · 2011-12-01T01:53:48.640

It works in Safari (tested with Safari 5.1 on OS X Lion, and Safari mobile on iPad), not with Chrome yet. See http://caniuse.com/css-hyphens for hyphens browser support.

Here is how paragraphs are styled in the 320 and up project (http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/projects/320andup/):

p {
    hyphens:auto;
    text-align:justify;
    -webkit-hyphens:auto;
    -webkit-hyphenate-character:"\2010";
    -webkit-hyphenate-limit-after:1;
    -webkit-hyphenate-limit-before:3;
    -moz-hyphens:auto;
}

(last line is for Firefox)

So justified text in browsers which was a big no-no is slowly becoming a reality.

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 27 '12 at 02:28

Better days are coming.. After browsing the Editors working draft - In the instance provided I think the better property in future would be 'overflow-wrap:'. 'hyphens:' is really more suited to general formatting requirements, whereas overflow-wrap is for the emergency cases of overly long words that require breaking. The best value would be

* {
overflow-wrap:hyphenate. 
}

Alas overflow-wrap doesen't seem to be supported in any way just yet on the iphone or firefox, and overflow-wrap:hyphenate isn't even in the working draft. (sadface)

WebKit Hyphenation

3 Answers3

Linked