From our colleague’s web site,
http://jkorpela.fi/chars/spaces.html
“On web browsers, no-break spaces tended to be non-adjustable, but
modern browsers generally stretch them on justification.”
Jukka Korpela then offers pointers about avoiding unwanted stretching.
and
“The change in the treatment of no-break spaces, though inconvenient, is
consistent with changes in CSS specifications. For example, clause 7
Spacing of CSS Text Module Level 3 (Editor’s Draft 24 Jan. 2019) defines
the no-break space, but not the fixed-with spaces, as a word-separator
character, stretchable on justification.”
So it appears that there’s no interoperability problem with HTML.
It seems that the widespread breakage which Asmus Freytag mentions is
limited to legacy applications which persist in treating U+00A0 as the
old “hard space” such as Word. It also appears that Microsoft tried and
failed to correct the problem in Word. Perhaps they should try again.
Meanwhile, in the absence of anything from Unicode more explicit than
already recommended by the Standard, Shriramana Sharma might be well
advised to continue to lobby the respective software people. As more
applications migrate towards the correct treatment of U+00A0, they are
probably already running into interoperability problems with Microsoft
Word and may well have already implemented solutions.
