text - Soft hyphen in HTML (<wbr> vs. &shy;)

Question

How do you solve the problem with soft hyphens on your web pages? In a text there can be long words which you might want to line break with a hyphen. But you do not want the hyphen to show if the whole word is on the same line.

According to comments on this page <wbr> is a non standard "tag soup invented by Netscape". It seems like ­ has its problems with standard compliance as well. There seems to be no way to get a working solution for all browsers.

Which is your way for handling soft hyphens and why did you choose it? Is there a preferred solution or best practice?

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See related SO Discussion here.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, &shy's support is so inconsistent between browsers that it can't really be used.

QuirksMode is right -- there's no good way to use soft hyphens in HTML right now. See what you can do to go without them.

2013 edit: According to QuirksMode, ­ now works/is supported on all major browsers.