proper coding or use for mdash

Terminology: An em dash is an "em dash." An "mdash" only exists if 
it's surrounded by & and ;.

>In some portuguese language literature books, the mdash is often 
>used to indicate changes between characters in a dialogue.
>
>I would like to know what should be the proper way to markup 
>dialogues like this, using accessible HTML, without changing the 
>original text. Does using the entity — alone suggests it is a 
>dialogue?

The correct character is actually the figure dash, ‒. Em dash 
— may look the same, but it isn't the same character (just as 
Greek SIGMA and SUMMATION look the same but aren't, or A in Latin, 
Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets). You can, however, use — anyway. 
It is a very minor and legalistic difference.

>Netscape4.x and IE5.5 don't render any punctuation marks for the q element.

Given lousy support for <q> and its poor typographic appearance, and 
given the fact that all the codes for opening and closing quotation 
marks are unambiguous, why bother using <q>? <q> is another of the 
W3C's half-arsed and misguided "structural" elements that are 
unusable in the real world.

>I even thought about using something like: <p>&mdash,<q>I had a 
>great time in Venice</q></p> So I could retain the original mdash 
>and use the proper quotation markup. But I've found some agents 
>doesn't render de &mdash; entity properly, since it is not ISOlatin1.

&#8212; renders even in Netscape 4.

You can try this CSS:

q:lang(pt)
{
quotes: '&#8210; ' '' '' ''
}

That's figure dash plus space, then nothing, nothing, nothing (for 
opening outer, closing outer, opening inner, closing inner, 
respectively).
-- 

     Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org
     Accessibility <http://joeclark.org/access/>
     Weblogs and articles <http://joeclark.org/weblogs/>
     <http://joeclark.org/writing/> | <http://fawny.org/>

Received on Tuesday, 12 March 2002 16:52:24 UTC