Re: Feedback: /International/questions/qa-escapes.en.php

hello Victoria,

On 09/02/2015 15:21, richard@w3.org wrote:
> http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-escapes.en.php
>
>
> Name: Victoria Clare
...

> I was hoping for guidance on how best to encode the em dash and en dash characters.
>
> Writing style guides are firm that, for example, written fiction in standard English should use these for a certain kind of pause. The characters are widely used in novels, historical writing etc.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash http://www.dashhyphen.com/using-the-dash/
>
> But I don't have those characters on my English language keyboard, and most of the wysiwyg interfaces I use don't support them.  So writers end up manually searching and replacing these characters through HTML when they are writing online.

This may help: 
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/type-em-en-dashes-word-processor/

> To my mind — is clearly superior to — because I can at least immediately see what it's supposed to be in my document.  Although best of all would be to somehow get the little annoyances added to a standard English language character set, and ideally, to my keyboard!

I tend to agree that — is easier to spot, type and remember than 
—.  We sounded a word of caution in the article above for the 
case where the content was to be used directly in XML – since XML 
doesn't by default recognise the entities.  Personally, these days, I 
mostly tend to use   and such when I need an escaped form. However, 
because it's easy on a Mac, I always type my en and em dashes as characters.

hope that helps,
ri

Received on Monday, 9 February 2015 18:12:42 UTC