Preventing line breaks in <code> elements
Preventing line breaks in <code> elementsPosted 18 July 2026One of my favourite tiny details in this website is my non-breaking spaces. My website is viewed at lots of different sizes, and browsers choose where to insert line breaks. For example, (?-u:…) was split into (?- and u:…), while the flag --multiline was split with - on one line and -multiline on the other.
- ▪Preventing line breaks in <code> elementsPosted 18 July 2026One of my favourite tiny details in this website is my non-breaking spaces.
- ▪My website is viewed at lots of different sizes, and browsers choose where to insert line breaks.
- ▪For example, (?-u:…) was split into (?- and u:…), while the flag --multiline was split with - on one line and -multiline on the other.
Hacker News (Front Page) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 993 of its stories. Top-voted stories on Hacker News.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Alexwlchan |
| Canonical URL | https://alexwlchan.net/2026/non-breaking-code/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:20:17 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-24T15:55:28.244Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-24T15:55:28.244Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | hJjZFmd4cdH8 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Preventing line breaks in <code> elementsPosted 18 July 2026One of my favourite tiny details in this website is my non-breaking spaces. I have code that looks for phrases like “5 cm”, “New York”, or “Objective‑C”, and inserts a non-breaking space/hyphen so they’ll never be split across multiple lines.This is the sort of typographical nicety that would be handled by a professional typesetter if I was writing a printed book with a fixed layout, but that’s not how websites work. My website is viewed at lots of different sizes, and browsers choose where to insert line breaks.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Alexwlchan.
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