On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 11:21:29PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 6/22/06, Chad Perrin perrin@apotheon.com wrote:
Would requiring spaces on either side of the double dash before converting it into an emdash improve the parsing behavior any? 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.
I actually don't like this solution, even though it seems neat. The trouble is, it's just not "intuitive" in the sense that no one would expect markup to behave differently whether it has spaces around it or not. Someone is likely to see "foo--boo" get rendered as an en-dash and think "damn, how do I get an em-dash?" Nothing else -- with the exception of space indentation itself -- in mediawiki gets rendered differently depending on spaces surrounding it.
Rendering foo--boo as an endash would be inappropriate, even if the editor intended an endash, anyway. Endashes are not meant to be used as hyphens, and should have a space on either side of them.
Or maybe I'm confusing Wikipedia and MediaWiki here - your solution is perhaps not bad for MediaWiki, switchable by individual site admins. But for Wikipedia it's a bad idea.
I'm not sure I see how something good for MediaWiki is bad for Wikipedia, in this case. Could you elaborate on the difference as it relates to this issue?
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.
It's "intuitive" *after the fact*. "Oh, I get how it works now - that's cute!" Em-dash from -- is blissfully ignorantly intuitive - people will get it right without even realising that they were doing anything. Many editors probably don't even realise that -- is not a good way of doing an em-dash at the moment.
That's sort of the problem: people will keep doing emdashes with -- and never realize something's wrong, in many cases, I suspect.
Of course, considering the miniscule differences between hyphens and endashes, I'm not sure endashes really need to be addressed for general visual formatting purposes. I'm sure there are some strict endash fans who will disagree vehemently with me, though.