I understand that this tag could easily be replaced with and a little bit of CSS, but in real life markup I often find that <
As said, names shall not be breaked, due Russian typography: Thus there is some semantics. So as You said Yourself, instead of marking the name by formatting tags, let's use meaningful tags. And voilà, you can style the name as needed, i.e. by white-space: nowrap; rule for all pages, or for just the Russian localization.