On Monday, January 12, 2004, at 02:20 PM, Universal Head wrote:
A quick HTML Entities question. For a closed single quote, for example, is it better to use
’
or
’
- and what is the distinction?
I can't answer your specific case, but I *can* paraphrase it with an example of my own.
I've been using — and – for YEARS in my HTML, until I recently discovered that these don't work on Netscape 4.x (or earlier I guess). Whilst NN4.x isn't exactly a common browser anymore, it still made me think about how other browsers that I no longer test on too often were behaving.
Quote from http://www.alistapart.com/articles/emen/
Since Netscape 4.x browsers don’t understand many of
the named entity references (such as ’ for a
right single quote), I’m not going to mention any of
them here (though they have been used by A List Apart,
bless its little heart).As such, my text/entity conversion functions (in PHP) now use — and – for em- and en-dashes respectively. I also use the numeric entities for opening and closing single and double quotes, and a whole bunch of other stuff, most of which is mentioned in the above link.
The downside? Greatly reduces readability of the HTML source.
The upside? Greatly increases the chances that a browser will get it right.
Readability isn't a problem for me, because my CMS has decent previewing a conversion tools, but it might be an issue if previewing isn't available.
Read the above link, and make your own --informed-- decision.
Justin French ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *****************************************************
