It seems I was a bit too brisk with my assertion. Hyphenation is coming (at some point in the indefinite future), only the implementation details seem to be not yet agreed upon – not even in a rudimentary way – which is probably why no browser dares to implement it.
The Working Draft links to another Draft where a possible implementation is detailed [1]. Looking around the public mailing list it seems that some have been barking up that tree for a long time.
Standards really don’t seem to be the holdup. At least some people have campaigned for the inclusion of hyphenation in the past.
I still think that implementation isn’t the problem, either. This seems to be one of those eccentric typographic details that is ignored and can safely be ignored because the web doesn’t depend on it (kind of like kerning and ligatures which are now only slowly finding their way into browsers). It’s also not exactly flashy like rounded borders, drop shadows or gradients. That might be the reason why browser vendors are dragging their feet. They could implement it but it’s not super-trivial so they rather wait and see.
It seems I was a bit too brisk with my assertion. Hyphenation is coming (at some point in the indefinite future), only the implementation details seem to be not yet agreed upon – not even in a rudimentary way – which is probably why no browser dares to implement it.
The Working Draft links to another Draft where a possible implementation is detailed [1]. Looking around the public mailing list it seems that some have been barking up that tree for a long time.
Standards really don’t seem to be the holdup. At least some people have campaigned for the inclusion of hyphenation in the past.
I still think that implementation isn’t the problem, either. This seems to be one of those eccentric typographic details that is ignored and can safely be ignored because the web doesn’t depend on it (kind of like kerning and ligatures which are now only slowly finding their way into browsers). It’s also not exactly flashy like rounded borders, drop shadows or gradients. That might be the reason why browser vendors are dragging their feet. They could implement it but it’s not super-trivial so they rather wait and see.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-css3-gcpm-20070205/#hyphenation