On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 11:16:56PM +0300, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
Chad Perrin wrote:
I suppose I should go look at the bugzilla discussion now. I seem to
recall, last time I looked at it, that the endash people were advocating
for -- being translated to endashes and --- to emdashes, which seems
counterintuitive for both, since endashes are supposed to be shorter
than - and emdashes have been represented as -- for so long and in so
many contexts that using three dashes will just confuse the heck out of
many. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
Wot? En dashes are, by definition, one en long. Hyphens are usually
shorter.
Compare:
- hyphen
– en dash
— em dash
You could be right about that. I haven't dealt with endashes much, so
may just be misremembering them. I still like -- for emdashes, though,
since (among other reasons) it's pretty nearly the correct size for an
emdash anyway (and because it's what pretty much everybody uses when
true emdashes aren't available in other contexts). I also like the fact
that, in absence of text being parsed and transformed to render true
emdashes, -- is recognizable as such to the casual reader (or editor who
is viewing the content source, in the case of MediaWiki). Frankly, I
tend to expect that if we used -- and --- for endash and emdash,
respectively, we'd get thousands of endashes were emdashes were
intended, and that it's a problem that would never entirely go away as
new users/editors join the Wikimedia community all the time.
So far, though, there seem to be problems with every suggestion put
forward -- in some cases, unacceptable problems in an otherwise
excellent solution. It will probably be a while before something
workable is implemented.
--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [
http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"There comes a time in the history of any project when it becomes necessary
to shoot the engineers and begin production." - MacUser, November 1990