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

[Clive R Sweeney]

Tim Beadle said the following on 8/27/2004 4:43 AM:

>>It's a fairly long article, with many examples and suggestions. A 
>>footnote indicates it was updated as recently as "2003-05-07".
>>    
>>
>Ah! You've met Jukka, then! OK, so the article wasn't updated recently, 
>but the guy knows his stuff and is a stickler for detail and correctness. 
>He hangs out on the WebAIM list - www.webaim.org/discussion/\
>  
>
Actually I wasn't intending to imply that it was out of date. Just the 
contrary. My comment on the update was meant to indicate that, even 
though the article was last updated 15 months ago, it's really not that 
long ago and so should still be relevant.

>2. As someone else said: what's wrong with — ?
>  
>
Well, according to the article, there's actually "better support" for 
— than for —

>I think validation should pick these sorts of things up.
>
No, this is not a validation problem. I've been using — for a long 
time (on pages with the iso-8859-1 character encoding, in case you're 
wondering) and the pages validate just fine. As I mentioned earlier, 
— seems to be the standard now for the em dash character.

And remember, the em dash is just one example of the characters he's 
listing as problematic (e.g. trade mark, ellipsis, "smart" right and 
left quotation marks, etc.). What he's saying is that these characters 
cannot be dependably used in your web pages. The replacements he 
suggests include <sup>(TM)</sup> if you want to indicate the trademark 
symbol (instead of &#8482; or &trade;) and a double hyphen for the em dash.

I'm not planning on following his advice, but I'm still interested in 
hearing if others on thelist have found any significant problem with 
using these characters.

-- 
Clive R Sweeney
Designshift.com | Durham NC