Chad Perrin wrote:
On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 08:17:42AM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
Luckily we've already got one: –
Damn typography snobs... ;)
That may look like a joke, but I agree -- endashes are rare enough in comparison that it seems that if one of the two is going to be somewhat unintuitive, it should be the endash, and thus the HTML entity strikes me as a good answer to the problem.
Sure, I'd consider the endash to be entirely ignorable from a perspective of what common people actually expect to be able to use, type, and see.
Would requiring spaces on either side of the double dash before converting it into an emdash improve the parsing behavior any?
No; the conversion simply needs to be smart enough not to damage markup, but to instead operate only in plain text areas. (Additionally it probably ought to exclude itself from areas like <pre>, <tt>, and <code>.)
It should at least solve the image name problem, since spaces in image names should (in my honest opinion) be considered a no-no in any case. Then again, I'm not in charge, of course.
On the contrary, spaces are highly recommended in image names. Names should be descriptive; "Lake McFoobar viewed from Mount Baz lookout point.jpg" is strongly preferred to, say, "DSC000247.JPG".
Note that images' names are going to be more and more decoupled from their physical filenames in the future; the file extension won't have to be maintained as part of the wiki name for it and it will be possible to change names after uploading.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)