There was a time when ~word~ meant italics, _word_ mean underscore, and /word/ meant bold, and that was about it IRRC. mh On Thu, 24 Feb 2011, Lee Passey wrote:
On Thu, February 24, 2011 3:33 am, Jana Srna wrote:
On Feb 23, 2011, at 11:44, bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
[snip]
What does a tilde in the original mean?
see if you can figure it out!
Ah, that's quite a helpful answer!...
This is a perfect example what I mean when I say that z.m.l. has rules but you have to figure out what they are on your own, and that they are constantly changing. If you look at the various descriptions that BowerBird has published over the years, you might note that he never actually defines the markup and how it is appropriately used; instead he only provides examples of how it might be used in specific situations.
I'm all for examples, but they should be used to illustrate a technical specification, not as a replacement therefor. I suspect that BowerBird is the only one who is truly capable of using z.m.l., as he is the only one who understands all the rules (and when he finds a construct his rules don't cover he can simply make up a new rule to account for it).
I thought that they might be there to represent non-breaking spaces, but then "button~hole" doesn't make any sense to me, so I guess I can't figure out what they're there for after all. That's a pity.
In pre-computer text hyphens served two purposes: to combine parts of a compound word, or to divide a word (generally on syllable boundaries) when it occurred at the end of a line. Hyphens used for these purposes are now typically referred to as "hard" hyphens (compound words) and "soft" hyphens (divided words).
In reflowable markups like HTML, soft hyphens can be ignored and not displayed when they do not fall in the User Agent's hyphenation zone. However, because the screen "canvas" size is so highly variable soft hyphens serve little purpose, because the chance that they will fall in the hyphenation zone is minuscule and it is impractical to pre-hyphenate every word in a text. Nowadays, it is much more practical in HTML to simply remove all soft hyphens and rely on automated hyphenation algorithms to hyphenate on-the-fly.
This general rule changes slightly, however, when your markup attempts to preserve original line breaks as they appear in a specific printed version of a book. In this case, when a hyphen appears at the end of a line one has to determine whether it is a soft hyphen, breaking a normal word on a line boundary, or whether it is a hard hyphen which may not be removed when wrapping lines of text.
A couple of years ago (at least!), when I was experimenting with preserving line breaks I decided to use the tilde as the visible representation of a soft hyphen, which could be removed when text was rendered. Thus "~<br/>" would indicate a soft hyphen which could be removed when appropriate, whereas "-" in any context would indicate a hard hyphen which would have to be displayed in all cases. (A simplified example, the actual markup was a bit more complex).
At a guess, it appears that BowerBird is using the tilde as a replacement hyphen, but has reversed the meaning I used. Because "button-hole" is a compound word, the hyphen in it is a hard hyphen which must always be preserved. I assume that in the example you cited "button~hole" was split on a line break, which would mean that "tilde followed by line break" indicates a hard hyphen. The corollaries to this assumption are that "hyphen followed by a line break" indicates a soft hyphen but "hyphen followed by anything but a line break" is still a hard hyphen.
If "button~hole" does not fall on a line break, I would still have to guess that a tilde is a hard hyphen, but it would make the text quite odd to have tildes scattered throughout a text wherever there would ordinarily be a hard hyphen.
On the other hand, if BowerBird can't provide a straight~forward response to a straight~forward question, maybe this is one of those rules that is still in flux and he hasn't quite figured out what the rule ought to be. You might try telling him what you think the rule ought to be and that might crystallize his thinking. He'll either respond with "Bravo, that's exactly what I have in mind and you're a genius for agreeing with me!" or he'll respond with "Sorry, you guessed wrong and you're an idiot because you don't agree with me." Either response is possible, but in no case will he admit that he hadn't already figured out the rule.
Kind of like a spouse.
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