Are em-dashes bad?

August 1, 2004 6:34 PM

Are em-dashes bad? In my post from yesterday I used an — and some “ and ”s (double quotes). But looking at it just now I see they've been changed to plain old - and ". Was this done by hand or automatically? Are there still systems / browsers that mangle these charaters?
posted by Space Coyote to Bugs at 6:34 PM (7 comments total)

that's & mdash; and & ldquo; and & rdquo;
posted by Space Coyote at 6:35 PM on August 1, 2004

Did you use them as HTML character entities or pasted directly from an editor which uses them? The latter will break the RSS feed; the former, I believe, will not.
posted by Danelope at 6:37 PM on August 1, 2004

both, actually. In my intro I used the character entities, but the quotes from the article I believe had the double quotes. (it all looked fine in my atom feed from sharpreader, FWIW)
posted by Space Coyote at 6:45 PM on August 1, 2004

—
posted by smackfu at 8:37 PM on August 1, 2004

the rss feed was invalid, so I changed them by hand. I have some code to convert high ascii, and I don't know why it didn't fix itself.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:31 PM on August 1, 2004

teh point is, don't use high ascii. boon.
posted by bob sarabia at 11:16 PM on August 1, 2004

Is there a key on the keyboard for that, or do you have to use the sgml character?
posted by bingo at 4:55 PM on August 2, 2004