The HTML <wbr>
element represents a word break opportunity—a position within text where the browser may optionally break a line, though its line-breaking rules would not otherwise create a break at that location.
Content categories | Flow content, phrasing content. |
---|---|
Permitted content | Empty |
Tag omission | It is an empty element; it must have a start tag, but must not have an end tag. |
Permitted parents | Any element that accepts phrasing content. |
Implicit ARIA role | No corresponding role |
Permitted ARIA roles | Any |
DOM interface | HTMLElement |
Attributes
This element only includes the global attributes.
Notes
On UTF-8 encoded pages, <wbr>
behaves like the U+200B
ZERO-WIDTH SPACE
code point. In particular, it behaves like a Unicode bidi BN code point, meaning it has no effect on bidi-ordering: <div dir=rtl>123,<wbr>456</div>
displays, when not broken on two lines, 123,456
and not 456,123
.
For the same reason, the <wbr>
element does not introduce a hyphen at the line break point. To make a hyphen appear only at the end of a line, use the soft hyphen character entity (­
) instead.
This element was first implemented in Internet Explorer 5.5 and was officially defined in HTML5.
Example
The Yahoo Style Guide recommends breaking a URL before punctuation, to avoid leaving a punctuation mark at the end of the line, which the reader might mistake for the end of the URL.
<p>http://this<wbr>.is<wbr>.a<wbr>.really<wbr>.long<wbr>.example<wbr>.com/With<wbr>/deeper<wbr>/level<wbr>/pages<wbr>/deeper<wbr>/level<wbr>/pages<wbr>/deeper<wbr>/level<wbr>/pages<wbr>/deeper<wbr>/level<wbr>/pages<wbr>/deeper<wbr>/level<wbr>/pages</p>
Specifications
Specification | Status | Comment |
---|---|---|
HTML Living Standard The definition of '<wbr>' in that specification. |
Living Standard | |
HTML5 The definition of '<wbr>' in that specification. |
Recommendation |
Browser compatibility
Desktop | Mobile | |||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
wbr | Chrome Full support 1 | Edge Full support 79 | Firefox Full support 1 | IE No support 5.5 — 7 | Opera Full support 11.6 | Safari Full support 4 | WebView Android Full support Yes | Chrome Android Full support Yes | Firefox Android Full support 4 | Opera Android ? | Safari iOS ? | Samsung Internet Android Full support Yes |
Legend
- Full support
- Full support
- No support
- No support
- Compatibility unknown
- Compatibility unknown
See also
overflow-wrap
word-break
hyphens
- The
<br>
element