I recently found Hyphenator which is quite cool ... but it should be possible to implement this functionality within ikiwiki and not rely on javascript and the client.

A Perl implementation of the algorithm exists in TeX::Hyphen.

I'd be inclined to say that Javascript run in the client is a better place to do hyphenation: this is the sort of non-essential, progressive-enhancement thing that JS is perfect for. If you did it at the server side, to cope with browser windows of different sizes you'd have to serve HTML sprinkled with soft-hyphen entities at every possible hyphenation point, like

pro­gress­ive en­hance­ment

which is nearly twice the byte-count and might stop search engines from indexing your site correctly.

A browser that supports Javascript probably also supports soft-hyphen marks, but I doubt all non-JS browsers support them correctly.

It might be good to have a plugin to insert a reference to the hyphenation JS into the <head>, or a general way to enable this sort of thing without writing a plugin or changing your page.tmpl, though. Perhaps we should have a local.js alongside local.css? :-)

--smcv

Thanks, I did not realize that the javascript does something else than add &shy;s - took a closer look at it now. I doubt however that adding them will increase the byte count more than transmitting the javascript.