Occasionally, when visiting certain sites, I see and mdash printed. Is this supposed to be there, and what does it mean?

MarkyBoy

Just to clarify: the question I posted didn't appear exactly as I originally typed it! The mysterious 'word' I sometimes see is an ampersand sign, followed by 'mdash'. May 17 02, 11:18 PM

eliasen

I know this web site is going to brutally corrupt my answer, but I'm going to write it anyway. It corrupted your question -- turned the ampersand into ' and ' for no good reason. It'll do this to my reply, so it won't make any sense. Why do I bother? I sent e-mail to the developers but they don't bother to respond. The HTML character reference and {mdash;} should provide an 'em dash' in the document you see on screen. An 'em dash' is a character used by typesetters indicating a dash which is the width of the lowercase letter 'm'. The double-hyphens I'm entering here -- like this -- would normally be typeset as an em-dash. If you put the mdash correctly, *with* leading ampersand and trailing semicolon, into an HTML 4.0 or later document, it will display an 'em-dash' character, in the document, and not show the character reference. The reason that this doesn't show up right sometimes is: * The writer of the HTML page forgets to put the semicolon at the end of ' and {mdash;'} This is a developer error. Do a 'view-source' to see if this is in fact the problem. * The HTML 3.2 specification didn't include the 'mdash' character reference. So if your browser is rendering in HTML 3.2 mode, it won't show up right. This is an old-browser-problem. * The developer of the HTML page didn't properly specify a DOCTYPE specifier at the top of the document, so the document isn't being rendered in HTML 4.0 mode, and the character thus doesn't appear correctly. This is again a developer error. May 18 02, 8:00 AM