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Re: Hyphenation best practices

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jan 5, 2010 12:45PM

Bevi Chagnon | PubCom wrote:

> Those of us from the professional publishing world learn the
> keyboard/ASCII characters for en-dashes, em-dashes, and other
> typographic glyphs.

Those who know ASCII know that it contains no en dash or em dash, and glyphs
are different from characters. But that's not important right now.

> If we want our information correctly interpreted by computers - which
> includes screen readers, search engines, and content management
> systems - we need to use the correct glyph at the right time.

Correct use of characters is mostly a matter of typographic quality. Search
engines, in particular, tend to ignore all punctuation.

> Strict typesetting protocol of yesteryear was to set em-dashes "tight"
> without spaces.

I think that's still the typographic norm. But I stand corrected: Jared
Smith referred to New York Times practice, and their web site really uses em
dashes with spaces around (which is typographically horrendous, when normal
spaces are used; but I digress).

> But today that rule is loosened; because of a lack of hyphenation on
> websites, many style guides and editors allow "spaced" em-dashes so
> that HTML text can reflow more easily and keep words visually more
> readable.

I don't think it has much to do with HTML. People don't usually use en and
em dashes on web pages.

Interestingly enough, IE 8 treats an em dash as allowing a line break after
it, even in the absence of a space, whereas Firefox 3 treats it as allowing
a line break _before_ it. But this is not much of an accessibility issue.

> However, I don't believe spaced or tight em-dashes affect 508
> accessibility one iota.

Maybe not, but there is a huge difference between "accessibility" and "508
accessibility".

On the other hand, even the accessibility impact is small. It still matters
what people regard as common and normal. This is a moot point: on the Web,
most authors use just hyphens instead of dashes; in quality print media,
most publications use dashes more or less according to typographic norms. So
what do your readers expect to see?

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/