Update: It seems my reading of the HTML 4 specification is not universal. And, to make matters worse, neither of the HTML, Unicode or ISO Latin 1 standards agree on what the shy character should mean. See Soft Hyphenation (SHY) - a hard problem? for the gory details.
There is this nifty little HTML character entity, ­, which lets one give soft hyphenation hints to browsers. But, when writing documentation for code, one sometimes needs write really, unbelivably, imagination-strainingly long identifiers. And, having them hyphenated, when split over multiple lines might not be what one wants (at least, it is not what I want).
Exempli Gratia
Here is an example of what might happen, if the browser cannot break your long identifier into little bits and pieces:
sheared.web.querystring.UnvalidatedInput.as_text
So, when you has to type in a pathologically long identifier from a program, and you want it to gracefully break in two on the middle, what can you do?
One solution
I have only tested this with Mozilla Firebird 0.7.1, it might not work on any other browsers.
Those of us living in CSS-land can actually do something. Rendering a
white-space with zero font-size produces no visible break
when inside a word. But, if you place such a zero-width white-space
inside a word, the word is happily chopped into pieces where you
inserted it.
So, this goes into your stylesheet:
.shy { font-size: 0; }
This is your HTML:
sheared.<span class='shy' /> </span>web.<span class='shy' /> </span>querystring.<span class='shy' /> </span>UnvalidatedInput.<span class='shy' /> </span>as_text
And, suddenly it renders beautifully:
sheared. web. querystring. UnvalidatedInput. as_text