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                         M & N's—the candy of the web

> Stop! Go back and re-read the subhead above—at least 2–3 times—then let it
> sink in before continuing.
>
> The sentence above illustrates the proper use of the hyphen and the two
> main types of dashes. They are not the same, and must not be confused with
> each other. In some fancy fonts the difference is more than just the width—
> hyphens have a distinct serif. If you don’t know the rules already, let’s
> review them. First, though, a definition:
>
> An “**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.”
>

Via Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report [1], A List Apart: The Trouble
With EM 'n EN [2]



> So it made sense to use double hyphens (–) instead of em dashes and double
> primes (") instead of quotation marks. In any case, those workarounds were
> already familiar to anyone who’d grown up with typewriters, and readers
> adapted to ascii-only typography during the early days of the Internet when
> usenet, email, and the web all shared the same primitive markup and text
> display.
>
> These days, standards-compliant browsers can handle entity names, and even
> Netscape 4.x can manage numeric entity codes—but why should you care? After
> all, using the technically correct punctuation marks would mean a dozen new
> entities to be memorized and a lineup of well-meaning but under-informed
> editors and teammates to win over—and retrofitting any significant amount
> of copy is always a hassle.
>

Also via Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report [3], A List Apart:
Typography Matters [4]

It may seem strange that a programmer would care about typography, but it's
not unknown—Donald Knuth [5] took 10 years off writing The Art of Computer
Programming [6] to write the computer typographic system, TeX [7].

So I wrote some code to translate some of the more egrarious hacks I've been
using to get what I want, and converted over using the proper characters that
are available. And yes, I checked the the Usual Suspects [8] (Lynx, Netscape,
Mozilla and Microsoft IE) and they all support the characters (well, Lynx as
best as it can) required, so that's that.

[1] http://www.zeldman.com/coming.html
[2] http://www.alistapart.com/stories/emen/
[3] http://www.zeldman.com/coming.html
[4] http://www.alistapart.com/stories/typography/
[5] http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/
[6] http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html
[7] http://www.tug.org/
[8] http://us.imdb.com/Title?0114814

Email author at [email protected]