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Yes, there are many such use cases, and it would be impossible to predict what they are (what are you going to do, live word segmentation in the browser with an

Yes, there are many such use cases, and it would be impossible to predict what they are (what are you going to do, live word segmentation in the browser with any reliability across all languages in the world?). At the LDC, we do character-based annotation on words, which, since it includes highlighting individual characters, means each character has its own span (this is actually something I've seen done for wildly unrelated reasons on other sites, with spans, divs, etc). I'm sure there are millions of sites doing things like hiding/showing text that's next to other text for a million different reasons.

wtallis 8y ago
Can you elaborate on what "the LDC" is, and how broken your site would look if every piece of text you have styled to be invisible were instead shown by the browser? Breaking up a word into multiple tags is very different from inserting invisible extraneous content into the middle of a word. The latter is what I'm questioning the usefulness of; the former I can see as occasionally useful, but should be avoided when it breaks screen readers and search engines.
- ashelmire 8y ago
  Hey, sorry I missed this. LDC is the Linguistic Data Consortium (https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/ https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/). Our web annotation tool (internal app) would probably be broken in many places. Take a modal for example - the text is not visible until the modal is opened. Let's think about menus that display on hover - they wouldn't work. What about tooltips or other sorts of floating label type things? What about other text that only appears on hover, or when some action is performed? Sure, you could wait to insert these things into the page until the last second, but it would be less performant and complexity would be higher. If you saw what the web looked like without display: none and visibility: hidden, I think you'd change your mind. There are infinite applications.

wtallis 8y ago

Can you elaborate on what "the LDC" is, and how broken your site would look if every piece of text you have styled to be invisible were instead shown by the browser? Breaking up a word into multiple tags is very different from inserting invisible extraneous content into the middle of a word. The latter is what I'm questioning the usefulness of; the former I can see as occasionally useful, but should be avoided when it breaks screen readers and search engines.

ashelmire 8y ago
Hey, sorry I missed this. LDC is the Linguistic Data Consortium (https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/ https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/). Our web annotation tool (internal app) would probably be broken in many places. Take a modal for example - the text is not visible until the modal is opened. Let's think about menus that display on hover - they wouldn't work. What about tooltips or other sorts of floating label type things? What about other text that only appears on hover, or when some action is performed? Sure, you could wait to insert these things into the page until the last second, but it would be less performant and complexity would be higher. If you saw what the web looked like without display: none and visibility: hidden, I think you'd change your mind. There are infinite applications.