[thelist] Re: Em dashes not displaying for the client

Clive R Sweeney clive at designshift.com
Thu Aug 26 13:11:11 CDT 2004


This is just getting worse and worse. Maybe.

Following one of the links sent by Roger Ly, I encountered the page, "On 
the use of some MS Windows characters in HTML" -- 
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/windows-chars.html.

The author says:
"A Web author who works in a Windows environment may not realize that by 
using such characters he creates problems to many users who don't use 
Windows, and possibly to some Windows users, too. Typically, if an 
author naively types a trademark symbol, a browser running on Unix or 
some other non-Windows system will probably display a blank instead of 
the trademark symbol, or something worse."

It's a fairly long article, with many examples and suggestions. A 
footnote indicates it was updated as recently as "2003-05-07".

Of course, although he says that non-Windows machines will have problems 
displaying trademark symbols, em dashes, etc., I've found those symbols 
seem to work just fine on my Mac as well. This might make one question 
some of the other blanket statements in the article. Even so, if these 
characters do present problems for some users, what should the 
conscientious web developer do?

Yes, the em dash can be replaced by a double hyphen. I don't like it, 
but it works. On the other hand, replacing the trademark symbol 
(&#8482;) with <sup>(TM)</sup> is just nasty because of the extra 
linespacing it introduces.

But I only have access to Windows and Mac computers. Is there really a 
significant problem with these special characters?

-- 
Clive R Sweeney
Designshift.com | Durham NC





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