Kenneth Auchenberg solved a great CSS3 mystery for me — using hyphens to automatically break words to a new line.

“When you have an element with a dynamic width word-wrap: break-word, isn’t having any effect. Today’s browsers don’t use the calculated width to enforce the wrapping. Instead they seem to ignore the declaration.

Hyphenation is the better word-break. It’s locale aware, and inserts the hyphen character at the correct place, when breaking the words. The support of CSS3 Hyphenation has started in Firefox 6 for the english languages, and several other languages was added in Firefox 8.”

View the full article on his research.