[thelist] Re: Em dashes not displaying for the client
Clive R Sweeney
clive at designshift.com
Fri Aug 27 13:26:12 CDT 2004
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Actually I wasn't intending to imply that it was out of date.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 ™ or ™) 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
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