h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A491681 Solipsism

Changed hyphens to dashes.

Added link to Occam's Razor.

TRiG.

Hi TRiG
I have noticed you changing hyphens to dashes and using the special characters to do this.

I'm trying to remember to do this in my subbings, as well as in my own Entries

Hyphens work, but they're a bit messy. I find the dashes easier to read (also they're more grammatically correct). Jordan said he finds the hyphens easier, but I suspect he's in a minority.

Sometimes, though, we get dashes entered directly, unencoded. This will work on some browsers, but not on others, because the dash is outside the character set in which h2g2 pages are declared (as is the pound sign). Dashes must therefore be 'escaped' as —.

I've occasionally seen entries full of question marks which should be dashes or currency symbols (curly quotation marks and apostrophes have the same effect, which is why they are banned from the Edited Guide).

TRiG.

I'm with J, even though they are not correct. I think typesetting rules will be quietly dropped by the Internet in time anyway, just through common usage, but that's a whole different discussion.

Em dashes should not have spaces either side of them, though. You're just replacing one punctuation error with another...