HTML Tag

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The tag is used to instruct the browser, where in the text a line-break could be added. Unlike the tag, which oblige the browser to insert a line-break, when is used the browser first analyze its content, and then insert a line-break if necessary (too long word or URL address).

In case you do not use the tag, long words could either wrap in a wrong place (making it difficult to read), or not wrap at all - pushing the page layout to the side.

The tag is one of the HTML5 elements.

A hyphen at the line breakpoint is not introduced by the element. If you want a hyphen to occur only at the end of a line, use (soft hyphen character entity).

You may not use this element frequently. But if you need it, the will be really useful. Let’s look through the example below, where we have a file path.

<p>You can find the file by going
  C:\user\docs\Letter.txt
</p>

As you can see there isn’t any line-break opportunity, and the whole file path went to the next line. If you add elements, the file path will break properly, while rendering that paragraph.

<p>You can find the file by going C:<wbr>\user<wbr>\docs<wbr>\Files<wbr>\Letter.txt</p>

Syntax

The tag is empty, which means that the closing tag isn’t required. But in XHTML, the () tag must be closed ().

Example of the HTML tag:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Title of the document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Example of a long string of text without wbr.</p>
    <p>This is the longest word you can ever meet in the English language pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis</p>
    <p>Example of a long string of text with wbr.</p>
    <p>This is the longest word you can ever meet in the English language pneumono<wbr>ultra<wbr>micro<wbr>scopic<wbr>silico<wbr>volcano<wbr>coniosis</p>
    </p>
  </body>
</html>