Don't be so shy

Ever wish a word could be conditionally split in the middle? For example, if the word application didn't have room at the end of the line, instead of moving the whole word to the next line, it just hyphenated itself like so: App-[LF]lication. Look into the HTML entity ­ (the soft hyphen).

Here's the caveats. As it turns out, the only browser that seems to support this properly is Internet Explorer. In Mozilla, the shy doesn't show at all and in Netscape 4 it always appears. It may also prevent the browsers Find functionality from locating the word.

So it's not the most useful feature in HTML but it may just get you out of a bind.