WordJoiner

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Unicode provides a 'word joiner character at code point U+2060. This is a non-breaking zero-width space: it is invisible but prevents a line break from being inserted where it is placed. This allows the pagination rules of Unicode to be circumvented in cases where they produce undesirable results.

As MeatballWiki now supports Unicode, it is no longer necessary to use the special " (two double-quotes) delimiter to end a CamelCase link. Now one can use a word-joiner:

: WikiWord⁠s

This has the advantage of supporting simple copy-and-paste: copying the rendered text and pasting it into another page also copies the word-joiner, and hence the rendered result is the same on the second page.

(U+FEFF, the original zero-width non-breaking space, does not survive re-editing on Safari. This code point may simply be too high for MySQL? to support, or it may be a character Safari dislikes. Regardless, U+FEFF is now deprecated in this role, and should not be used.)

However, there are several problems with this approach:

Browsers that are not fully Unicode-compatible may not render the word-joiner character correctly and may corrupt it when a page is edited. This negates the benefits of using UTF-8 on sites that mainly use ASCII-only pages.
Typing a word-joiner character is highly non-trivial on most modern computer systems, while double-quotes are trivial. See Wikipedia: Unicode for how to type the rarer Unicode code points on common operating systems.
Finally, the word-joiner is effectively invisible in the editor on Unicode-compatible browsers, making it very obscure for new users ("why is this link not working when that one does?") and difficult to work with for all editors.

An alternative approach to avoiding the use of such delimiters is to search the database for potential truncated candidates if a link doesn't match; thus "WikiWords" could be automatically linked to "WikiWord" s". This approach does not extend to standard InterMap links, and magic is generally regarded as undesirable in syntax.

The <nowiki> tag can also be used: WikiWord<nowiki>s</nowiki> becomes WikiWordÿ?3ÿ. However, this is an excessive amount of extra typing and disrupts the editor when reading through the raw text.

A final option is to use an optional free-link-like syntax for ensuring links start and end where they should, e.g. <WikiWord>s becomes WikiWords. (This particular syntax precludes using HTML-like tags for markup, for readability reasons, but is a well-recognized standard enshrined in RFC 3986.)

If your browser doesn't fully support Unicode (Safari appears to), please don't edit this page as you may corrupt or lose the word-joiner character.

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WordJoiner

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