On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 11:16:56PM +0300, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
Chad Perrin wrote:
I suppose I should go look at the bugzilla discussion now. I seem to recall, last time I looked at it, that the endash people were advocating for -- being translated to endashes and --- to emdashes, which seems 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.
Wot? En dashes are, by definition, one en long. Hyphens are usually shorter.
Compare:
- hyphen
– en dash — em dash
You could be right about that. I haven't dealt with endashes much, so may just be misremembering them. I still like -- for emdashes, though, since (among other reasons) it's pretty nearly the correct size for an emdash anyway (and because it's what pretty much everybody uses when true emdashes aren't available in other contexts). I also like the fact that, in absence of text being parsed and transformed to render true emdashes, -- is recognizable as such to the casual reader (or editor who is viewing the content source, in the case of MediaWiki). Frankly, I tend to expect that if we used -- and --- for endash and emdash, respectively, we'd get thousands of endashes were emdashes were intended, and that it's a problem that would never entirely go away as new users/editors join the Wikimedia community all the time.
So far, though, there seem to be problems with every suggestion put forward -- in some cases, unacceptable problems in an otherwise excellent solution. It will probably be a while before something workable is implemented.