How hard would it have been for the HTML entity for “—” —
the em dash — to have been &emdash; and not
— ? Was there such a shortage of space available that
we couldn’t have that little “e” there? Did they believe that it was
called “m dash”?
Every time I use one of those guys — and I use them a lot,
for better or for worse — I get it wrong and curse the entity
committee. (It must have been a committee.)
6 responses to “—”
Even worse, there’s a:
Em space!
M dash!
…
Holy cow, that’s awful. For those that didn’t get the email:   !@!#!
Oops, my semi-clever attempt at pasting (HTML) comments into (LJ) comments wasn’t so clever. Should wait until more awake.
Yes,  !
There are inconsistencies and annoyances all over the entities list.
I use
—quite a bit, and I never make a mistake. This doesn’t mean it’s done right. My personal favorites to say are…,š, andÿ.Using XHTML as opposed to HTML, you can define whatever entities you want at the top. Sure, this is a fudged up alternative to having the spec consistent in the first place, but it works.
It’s spelled that way so that the spell-checker can confuse it with ‘modish’. 8^)