HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
• Browsers are quite variable in what codecs they support. For example, Firefox 3.5
supports Theora for video in Ogg containers, while Safari browsers favor
QuickTime movies.
• Flash video will often be used to avoid cross-browser rendering concerns. Until this
element is widely supported, developers are advised to continue using Flash video.
<wbr> (Word Break)
This nonstandard element is used to indicate a place where a line break can occur if
necessary. This element is used in conjunction with the
nobr
element, which is used to keep
text from wrapping. When used this way,
wbr
can be thought of as a soft line break in
comparison to a
<br>
tag. This element is common to many earlier browsers, though it is
not part of any HTML standard.
Proprietary Syntax
<wbr
id="unique alphanumeric value">
Examples
<nobr>
A line break can occur here
<wbr>
but not elsewhere, even if
the line is really long.
</nobr>
<nobr>
For comparison a line break cannot occur here even if the
line is really long like this one is.
</nobr>
Compatibility
No standards support Internet Explorer 2-7, Netscape 1.1, 2, 3, 4, 4.5-4.8
Notes
• Early versions of standards-based browsers, such as Mozilla and Opera, do not
support this tag but, oddly, seem to support
<nobr>
. However, later versions,
including IE 8, correctly ignore this feature.
• To simulate this element's functionality for setting a soft break in modern browsers
that apply
white-space: nowrap
to an element, use the tag as a custom tag and
set its style like so:
<wbr style="display:inline-block;>
. Other schemes
using the
­
and
​
entities may provide useful functionality as well in
some cases.
• Documentation for older versions of Internet Explorer defined
class
,
language
,
style
, and
title
for this tag. However, they have little meaning, given this tag's
purpose, and have since been eliminated from the documentation, though they may
effectively be recognized in some manner by the browser parser.
• Though this is an empty element and should be written as
<wbr />
under XHTML,
it does not need to be. It is not standard and will not validate anyway.
