![]() The em dash ( -) is used to indicate a sudden break in thought (“I was thinking about writing a-what time did you say the movie started?”), a parenthetical statement that deserves more attention than parentheses indicate, or instead of a colon or semicolon to link clauses. First, neither an em dash nor an en dash should be confused with the hyphen (-), which is used to join compound words together. Though some of the finer points in the rules are complex, their basic applications are clear-cut and their misuse easily identifiable. First, though, a definition:Īn “ em” is a unit of measurement defined as the point size of the font-12 point type uses a 12 point “em.” An “ en” is one-half of an “em.” If you don’t know the rules already, let’s review them. In some fancy fonts the difference is more than just the width-hyphens have a distinct serif. ![]() They are not the same, and must not be confused with each other. The sentence above illustrates the proper use of the hyphen and the two main types of dashes. Stop! Go back and re-read the subhead above-at least 2–3 times-then let it sink in before continuing. ( FrontPage and Dreamweaver don’t insert most of these characters properly, so don’t rely on their “insert symbol” tools either.) Hyphens are Not Dashes #section6 Unfortunately, very few text editors support this, and many more browsers choke on UTF-8 characters than do on named entities, so don’t use them unless you don’t give a hoot about Netscape 4 users. The only way to insert these characters (and any character beyond 127) properly without using entity codes is to use the UTF-8 character encoding (the default for XHTML and XML documents). UTF-8 encoding to the rescue-almost #section5 Use the others if you wish, but only if you want to be bombarded by Netscape 4.x users complaining about your “corrupted” pages. Some characters have four methods of reference: named, decimal, hexadecimal, and UTF-8 (Unicode), but only the decimal form is reliable across browsers and platforms. The most reliable way to insert special characters by far is to use decimal entity notation. Since Netscape 4.x browsers don’t understand many of the named entity references (such as ’ for a right single quote), I’m not going to mention any of them here (though they have been used by A List Apart, bless its little heart). ![]() The entire range from through are invalid characters, and consequently should not be used. I’ve lost count of all the books, articles, and websites that claim an em dash is “ ”-but they’re all wrong. Read this, though, and you’ll understand the answers to both problems far better than almost anyone else, including your English teachers. The first is that until HTML 4 came along, the web was missing almost all of these tools (it’s still missing many important ones).īut the larger problem is, now that they’re available, almost no one publishing on the web today knows how to use them-or often even knows of their existence. Brief books for people who make websites.
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