Taw (Tomasz Wegrzanowski) wrote:
Steven G. Johnson wrote:
Just a suggestion, it would be great if it were easier to do proper dash typography. I find TeX's -/--/--- convention for hyphen/en-dash/em-dash to be fairly intuitive.
We could go TeX one better and make "----" the quotation dash (―). Although there are a couple of technical problems with /that/. ^_^
Right now, if you do — in the text, it makes things much less readable and is confusing for newbies. The need for these glyphs is so common that wiki support seems worthwhile.
Sure, sure, just research the subject "which browsers is it going to break".
They will appear literally as "–" and "—" on Netscape 4. The last I heard, lots of our visitors were still using that -- but the last I heard was about a year ago, so it may be false now.
This is one reason that /I/ change "—" to "--" when I see it. (The other is ease of editing, which Steven's suggestion would fix.)
There is another possible problem: Since "--" often means an em dash, and is used thus in many Wikimedia pages now (with "-" for an en dash), then a switch in the parsing code should require a conversion of old dashes. Such a conversion will have many exceptions and may be hard to design. However, another possibility is to forget it and let bad en dashes appear; it's a small cosmetic error that people will fix in normal proofreading.
-- Toby