line-break: anywhere

CSS

The 'line-break: anywhere' declaration allows soft wrapping around every typographic character unit, including around any punctuation character or preserved spaces, or in the middles of words. It disregards any prohibition against line breaks, even those introduced by characters with the GL, WJ, or ZWJ character class (see UAX 14) or mandated by the word-break property.

Chrome's implementation of the 'word-break: break-all' feature tries to match Edge, and the current spec draft, so that it ignores code points like "." (FULL STOP), which is categorized as IS. in UAX 14. However, end users seem to prefer Firefox's and Safari's behavior, although it is not completely spec complaint. So, the CSS working group resolved to introduce a new value for the line-break property to complement what 'word-break: break-all' provides (matching Firefox and Safari but also users expectations).

Status in Chromium

Blink components: Blink>Layout

Behind a flag (tracking bug) in:

Chrome for desktop release 76
Chrome for Android release 76
Android WebView release 76

Consensus & Standardization

After a feature ships in Chrome, the values listed here are not guaranteed to be up to date.

Firefox: In development
Edge: No public signals
Safari: In development
Web Developers: No signals

Owner

jfernandez@igalia.com

Last updated on 2019-06-03