Typography

One of the things that irks me is the use of the double-dash, "--", instead of the em-dash. Its use grew out of typewriters and terminals not offering the em-dash character, and having to use the minus sign instead. But now that the wordprocesser special character exists, there is no excuse for not using it.

I noticed that even in your own article on typographical characters, you still used the double-dash rather than the em-dash.

Note that this is also true regarding the left and right single and double quote, as opposed to the ditto, ", symbol. In this reply, I don't have access to markup, so even I am stuck with the ditto symbol in place of real quotes.

Suggesting using smart quotes in ISO 8859-1? You are just asking for platform specifi problems. Check the ASCII codes of some of thiese Windows Word auto-replace characters and you'll see they are really really high. What you likely won't see until you've made your site live is that only Windows fonts will support those extended characters in many cases. You'll run into all sorts of cross-platform as well as internationaization issues. (Just to name a few - if you ever have rare driver-database issues like I've experieced, it can be much much worse).

Don't bother using non HTML entity characters unless you are using Unicode. You'll save yourself many headaches in the long run.

We all have seen websites where font use and styling detracts from a professional appearance, so I agree that developers need to pay some attention to proper font and character entity usage. (For example, in addition to the article's mention of using a proper copyright symbol instead of a C surrounded by parentheses, using a double-hyphen instead of an 'em' dash just isn't typographically professional....)

However, with the wide range of operating system and browser combinations in use, it needs to be noted that there is varying compliance with the ISO 8859-1 standard. (And Unicode compliance is even less consistent than the ISO 8859-1 character set!) This is particularly noticeable when using the extended ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) character entities as well as mathematical symbols, Greek letters, and markup-significant and internationalization character entities.

The character tables referenced in the article are woefully incomplete. A better page listing HTML character entity codes for the ISO 8859-1 characters, symbols, mathematical symbols, Greek letters, and for markup-significant and internationalization character entity sets can be found at http://www.aim-higher.net/EntityReferenceViewer.asp. This is also a good test of your OS and browser's installed character sets. It also is handy reference listing both both the Character Entity Code Name and Character Entity Code Number for the less-used HTML characters and symbols; for example, the infamous "& nbsp ;" is equivalent to "& #160 ;"--they are interchangeable for your HTML coding. (Note: here and below I added spaces to the entity reference code in case this message displays them as their HTML entity code and not the code itself.... )

Until browsers and operating systems are in full compliance with the ISO-8859-1 standard, I'm a firm believer in providing pages that are cross-OS and cross-browser compliant and would reluctantly agree that using smart or curly quotes, proper apostrophes, 'en'- and 'em'-dashes and other typographically proper character entities may unnecessarily cause visitors with less-than-fully-compliant OS/browser combinations to experience the hassles of displayed entity code. After all, which of the following is easier to read: " Terry & #8217 ;s page", or "Terry's page" ? The first would be typographically preferred--if it renders visually but definitely an annoyance to the site visitor if the code and not the character entity is displayed!

Bottom line: make an informed call: do you want to look the most professional to those visitors using the newest or most compliant OS and browsers and ignoring the hassles for visitors with less than "latest-and-greatest" systems, or are you willing to sacrifice some fancy typography in the interest of a more universally readable page?