Note that I agree with your post. My point is the real necessity of non-breaking space.

The reason for the non-breaking space dates way before the advent of the web. While in modern days we call it non-breaking space, before electronic typesetting you would hear typographers to say:

A line should not be broken in certain circumstances

And one of these circumstances is between a treatment pronoun and the name, as in Mr. Smith, Mrs. Robinson or Sgt. Pepper’s

Non breaking space is just the electronic incarnation of this rule.

I’ve got the point about CMS and that is a good example where the non-breaking spaces are welcome!

Talking about a design, I insist if you dont want a line break you must have a good reason. If you dont then I give up

If you do have then I guess you want more things than just avoid a line break. Why? Cause the set of words without a line break probably represents a special element of layout. In this case an span tag is more appropriate.

Perhaps I’m wrong… Can you give me an example where this set of words are not so special? “Mr. Anderson” (hehe) is not a good example: why the hell you dont want a line break?!

Note that I agree with your post. My point is the real necessity of non-breaking space.

If you don’t want a line break between two or more words, they’re an important element. This importance justify the use of span or similar tag. So white-space:nowrap (or nobr tag) is enough and to spare. Things like   are the enemy .

Ok, that was a joke! But I believe that it should be avoided indeed. Or you think they don’t make your code dirty?

I don’t understand. Why you think   makes the code dirty? I don’t think so. I think is as natural as any other html entity (when properly used).

I think that using

<span class="nobreak">Mr. Smith</span>
.nobreak {
white-space:nowrap
}

may work, but at a cost.

Not breaking between Mr and Smith is related to the very own structure of the text, and not really to the typographycal presentation, so I don’t think it belongs there, just as tables don’t belong to layout structures.

Then, even if the solutions were equally acceptable, why write all that much, instead of a simple  ? Specially when I think this kind of thing should be enforced by CMS, just line thin spaces &thsp;, em-spaces  , en-spaces   em-dashes — and many others.

I’d love a powerful typographic enhanced CMS

Ok, that was a joke! But I believe that it should be avoided indeed. Or you think they don’t make your code dirty?