Apologies if this has been brought up before, but I am curious about the status of automatic replacement of dashes in the wikitext (in particular -- and ---) with HTML-entity versions that many users seem to like so much (ndash and mdash). I noticed that a while back (February 2004) such a conversion was implemented, but apparently reverted due to undesirable breakage. Any way it could be reinstated? I may look into it once I get familiar with the code. Also, there's some ongoing disagreement about "correct" quote usage: several users like to replace standard ASCII apostrophes with their lsquo/rsquo HTML counterparts, which seriously uglifies the wikitext. The same is true of normal double-quotes (ldquo/rdquo). I realize it may be quite difficult to implement some form of quote-matching that could automatically convert these from ASCII, especially given our other uses for single-quotes; would it be feasible to use multiple ASCII double-quotes to clue in the parser about desired behavior? e.g., "foo" for normal ASCII double-quotes, ""foo"" for an HTML lsquo/rsquo, and """foo""" for ldquo/rdquo. I can see where this might run into some problems in situations involving nested quotation, but seems adequate for the majority of quoting. Given the regularity of conflict over this issue (not to mention some users, who shall remain nameless, on a mission to replace all occurrences of what they perceive as bad quoting, wikitext readability be damned), it seems like something worth implementing. I like correct and nicely-readable HTML-entity-style quotes as much as the next guy, as long as it doesn't hamper editing. It's frustrating to see so much heated debate over a matter that could, at least in theory, be solved by such an improvement. Eric ===== Do you know stuff? Contribute to Wikipedia! http://www.wikipedia.org/ Help preserve the public domain by becoming a Distributed Proofreader. http://www.pgdp.net/ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail