How BudouX and CSS Together Fix Japanese Line-Breaking on the Web

Japanese text has no spaces, causing browsers to break lines at arbitrary character boundaries and misplace punctuation like 。, which looks incorrect to native readers. Proper Japanese typography requires breaks at phrase boundaries called 文節 and adherence to 禁則 rules, which forbid punctuation such as 。 or closing brackets from starting a new line. CSS properties like line-break: strict and word-break: keep-all handle the punctuation rules but prevent any line breaks at all, causing text to overflow. Google's lightweight phrase-segmentation library BudouX solves this by splitting sentences into natural chunks, which are then joined with HTML wbr tags to supply correct break points. The author applies this process at build time so no JavaScript reaches the reader, though BudouX is acknowledged as an approximation that may occasionally segment rare compounds incorrectly.