Preventing line breaks in <code> elements
Preventing line breaks in <code> elementsPosted 18 July 2026One of my favourite tiny details in this website is my non-breaking spaces. My website is viewed at lots of different sizes, and browsers choose where to insert line breaks. For example, (?-u:…) was split into (?- and u:…), while the flag --multiline was split with - on one line and -multiline on the other.
- ▪Preventing line breaks in <code> elementsPosted 18 July 2026One of my favourite tiny details in this website is my non-breaking spaces.
- ▪My website is viewed at lots of different sizes, and browsers choose where to insert line breaks.
- ▪For example, (?-u:…) was split into (?- and u:…), while the flag --multiline was split with - on one line and -multiline on the other.
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Preventing line breaks in <code> elementsPosted 18 July 2026One of my favourite tiny details in this website is my non-breaking spaces. I have code that looks for phrases like “5 cm”, “New York”, or “Objective‑C”, and inserts a non-breaking space/hyphen so they’ll never be split across multiple lines.This is the sort of typographical nicety that would be handled by a professional typesetter if I was writing a printed book with a fixed layout, but that’s not how websites work. My website is viewed at lots of different sizes, and browsers choose where to insert line breaks.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Alexwlchan.