Soft hyphen (SHY) – a hard problem?
There has been a fundamental controversy about the soft hyphen character (often abbreviated SHY, one HTML notation: ­). Although the ISO Latin 1 standard (ISO 8859-1) makes things perfectly clear, saying that it is a visible hyphen, to be used in a specific context, it is commonly regarded as hidden hyphenation hint, and this is what the Unicode standard currently says. These two views are incompatible.
This conflict of standards has its counterpart in various interpretations of the soft hyphen in programs. For example, Microsoft Office software treats the soft hyphen as a visible character with no special semantics; it uses an Ascii control character as a discreationary hyphen, calling it “soft hyphen”.
The “hyphenation hint” interpretation is caused by the strong needs for hyphenation of Web documents. These needs are very real, but it was a bad move to try to answer to them in a manner that implies a conflict between character code standards. Moreover, explicit hyphenation hints can play only a very small role in the solution of the hyphenation problem, and the (mis)use of SHY would not even be the best way of giving hyphenation hints.
