soft hyphens

… as handled by search engines.

Rolling dices to find out what will work, often seems to be just as efficient as checking up on browsers' support for web standards. So much more than browsers to take into account, and support for standards is kind of hit and miss.

The way I interpret W3C standards on manual introduction of word-break opportunities – “soft hyphens” etc, the coding variants shown below are equivalent. The following four variants of a word should therefore be handled as they appear on screen – unbroken and without hidden characters, regardless of how they are written…

accessibility (control) written as: accessibility
accessibility written as: accessibility
accessibility written as: ac<wbr>ces<wbr>si<wbr>bility
accessibility written as: accessibility

Now to see how search engines handle these variants, bearing in mind what the W3C has said about the issue.

For operations such as searching and sorting, the soft hyphen should always be ignored. Text: Hyphens

A quick test with the four equivalent versions of “accessibility” as search-word in three different search engines, gave the following results…

Edge/Bing: good – fail – good – fail
Chrome/Google: good – good – good – good
Opera/DuckDuckGo: good – fail – good – fail
Opera/Bing: good – fail – good – fail
Opera/Google: good – good – good – good
Opera/Yahoo: good – fail – good – fail

Multi-test in Opera done to show that it was search engines that got tested, and not browsers. Looks like Google has a good handle on things in this department, which isn't surprising.
Disappointing that Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo* don't “strip out” and ignore these control characters like they are supposed to.
* (I use DuckDuckGo as default search engine in my browsers.)

For completeness, here are a few more tests…

Opera/Wikipedia: good – good – good – good
Opera/Amazon: good – fail – good – fail
Opera/gunlaug.com *: good – good – good – good

* (Search on gunlaug.com is driven by Google Custom Search.)

One thing is to copy and paste in words with functional characters to search with. A more important question is if search engines that fail this operation, are able to find words and sentences with these and other functional characters in or between them written in files on the internet.

I cannot properly check how well search engines handle soft hyphens on sites they crawl. I do however have a feeling that the tested engines are about as good, or as bad, at handling functional and otherwise invisible characters anywhere in all their operations, as they have shown in my tests for search-words.

other applications

I also took a tour around a few on-line dictionaries to see how they manage when served words containing soft hyphens. Without naming and listing any: out of seven visited, two dictionaries literally guessed the right word and did OK, and the other five failed.

Makes me wonder why these functional characters aren't handled the way they should in all such applications. Why is the issue overlooked? When will those who have coded for failure gonna fix their software?

to conclude

So, I have made these tests, and found some weaknesses in some major and minor search engines and other applications. The results are a little worse than I expected, but not surprisingly so.

I do use soft hypens and other invisible characters when I write on/for the web, and see no reason to change a practice that works in all major browsers. That there still is software that cannot handle these characters properly, isn't really my problem.

Since there are limits to what I can and/or want to spend time on checking, some of the more problematic but rare issues my articles and notes may run into may remain unknown to me until long after the problem-causing apps have lost access to the world wide web.

sincerely georg; sign

Hageland 22.sep.2016
last rev: 23.sep.2016

technobabble galore…

I'll leave all that to whoever cares, while I try to figure out what to use the newly acquired knowledge about the status of search engines and other applications for. Any showstoppers?

It feels a bit like … whenever we want to do something in web design and/or content distribution, we may as well roll dices in an attempt to find out what will work and what won't work, and where it will fail. Although seemingly doing their job, most applications look like patchwork around the edges – probably because that's what they are.

May as well gamble on that what doesn't work properly today will be fixed tomorrow. That may or may not come through, but it is better to think positive and carry on in the hope of improved support across the board in days to come, than to leave out everything that may not be properly supported everywhere right now.

accessibility

So, what have soft hyphens and search engines and on-line dictionaries to do with accessibility? Well, if words and phrases released on the internet cannot be found, and/or they cannot be looked up for spelling and intended meaning, access to them and the articles they are part of seems a bit limited.

My interpretation of “accessibility on the web” covers a wide range of people and issues, as I do indeed want to provide equal access for everyone everywhere anyway I can. I'm also highly pragmatic, so what I cannot fix I rather ignore and leave to those who can to fix.

Unsupportive software falls into the “ignored” category, and I see no point in “coding down to weak software” as long as there is better software available.

there is progress

A constant flow of human shortcomings assures that there will never be a lack of incomplete, weak and buggy software, no matter how hard anyone tries to convince us about their excellence. Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, sometimes, somewhere. So, since none of our carefully crafted work has a chance to survive and work exactly as intended everywhere anyway, there is nothing to worry about in the field of web design.

The fact that most problems our work encounters on tour across the world wide web are caused by bugs and weaknesses in our own code, means there is always room for improvements at our end.
Pays to focus entirely on these “home-made” weaknesses, and let others take care of their stuff.

We know that none of the major browsers scores very high with regards to the complete CSS3 specs as of autumn 2016, but they are slowly improving…
Example: 63% CSS3 support
in Opera version 40

Following the progress and make our creations work optimally across browser-land, is enough of a target for most web carpenters. There's a limit to how much further it makes sense to go.

Of course, with enough time and resources at hand one can always go further…

Note: more tests…

search engines:

Ask: good
Info: good
Ixquick: good
AOL: fail
Webcrawler: fail
Infospace: fail
Contenko: fail
Dogpile: fail
Alhea: fail