[thelist] Character Entity Set Question

Pat Meeks pmeeks at email.msn.com
Sat Nov 17 21:40:47 CST 2001


I read Peter Sheerin's List Apart Article "The Trouble with Em 'n En" and
also checked out the W3C, but I still have questions. In the article, Peter
says to always use "—" for em dashes, etc. (and a few other
characters). However, when I go to the W3C, I see that character entities (I
think that's the correct term) are also listed:

<!ENTITY ndash   CDATA "&#8211;" -- en dash, U+2013 ISOpub -->
<!ENTITY mdash   CDATA "&#8212;" -- em dash, U+2014 ISOpub -->
<!ENTITY ldquo   CDATA "&#8220;" -- left double quotation mark, U+201C
ISOnum -->
<!ENTITY rdquo   CDATA "&#8221;" -- right double quotation mark, U+201D
ISOnum -->
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/emen/
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html

I get the impression from the W3C page, that if there is a character entity
specified, then it's ok to use it, you don't have to use numeric entity (it
seems contrary to Peter's article). I want the browsers to display my pages
properly, so is one method preferred over the other?

Thanks, Pat pmeeks at msn.com








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