Unicode Explained

Breaking the Flow of Text

Markup can be used even for parts of words. Should it affect the way in which the

textual content is processed, such as recognition of words? Consider the (old-fash-

ioned) HTML markup <b>F</b>oo, intended to make the word Foo appear so that first

letter is bold. Could search engines, for example, treat it as two words, “F” and “oo”?

Search engines generally parse HTML in a manner that effectively ignores most tags.

It is however possible that some programs do otherwise, either because they have poorly

written parsers or because they have intentionally been programmed to honor markup,

in a way. The latter would be quite natural for markup like <p>xxx</p><p>yyy</p>,

where the two elements should be treated as paragraphs and the strings xxx and yyy

as separate, not as xxxyyy.

In practice, search engines differ. Google treats <b>F</b>oo as “Foo,” whereas AltaVista

treats it as two words, “F oo.” Moreover, search engine behavior may vary by situation

and version. It is thus best to avoid using markup that breaks words, unless you have

real need for it.

For a markup language like HTML, it would be natural to think that inline (text-level)

markup (like b for bold face font) does not separate characters in any way, whereas

block-level markup (like p for paragraph) acts as a separator. However, neither HTML

specifications nor the Unicode standard discuss this issue, and ...