Why store as <shy>&nbsp;</shy> instead of &shy; ?

Problem/Motivation

The soft hyphen is stored as   in the database, which is not a valid HTML element.

This means that using the data via JSON API, or after uninstalling this module all elements are skipped and only the space is recognized, resulting in spaces instead of the soft hyphen.

Can't the soft hyphen be stored as a valid ­ instead?

Proposed resolution

Store it as ­ in the database.

Remaining tasks

TBD

API changes

TBD

Data model changes

TBD