Is Japanese word segmentation on web sites considered the norm and completely acceptable?

First off, I don't speak/read Japanese, making this a bit tricky.

But in researching Japanese internationalization for websites, I started looking into some reportedly popula开发者_StackOverflow社区r news sites (Yomiuri.co.jp and Asahi.com) and it doesn't look like they have any solutions implemented to prevent word segmentation. The browser is doing the basic kinsoku shori with punctuation/brackets/etc, but the sites both have flexible layouts and you can watch as most characters wrap individually.

Is this normal/understood/accepted? Seems awfully awkward.

Thanks! Mike

Kinsoku Shori as well as the other CJK line-breaking rules are the responsibility of the layout engine, not the document itself.

I do not get your question. As far as I know CJK languages do not have concept of word-spacing and you can split the lines almost anywhere.

Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_wrap#Word_wrapping_in_text_containing_Chinese.2C_Japanese.2C_and_Korean

The basic principle of kinsoku is that splitting most words most of the time is perfectly acceptable.