On 2012-06-04 Andy Thomas
He explicitly states: "Hyphenation is also present. ConTeXt inserts soft hyphen (0x00AD) characters where hyphenation is possible, which enables the browser to justify the paragraphs." Although a quick check of my xml file shows, that there is no hyphenation in Safari and there are no 0x00AD characters I can find with a Hex-Editor.
Don't inspect the XML rendered by the browser. Open the XML file directly with an editor. I don't know if the soft hyphens survive being digested by my mail agent, but the source contains 0x00AD characters: The Earth, as a habitat for animal life, is in old age and has a fatal illness. Several, in fact. It would be happening whether humans had ever evolved or not.
Maybe you could try with different viewers/browsers, because if there is an 0x00AD in the source, doesn't the viewer have to take care of the actual hyphenation?
Exactly, and it works fine here, even with an ancient version of Firefox (4.0) Marco