Re: hyphens

Tim Pierce (twpierce@midway.uchicago.edu)
Sat, 26 Nov 94 00:00:59 EST

> A quick note -- ISO 8859-1 has `minus' where most ASCII fonts display a
> hyphen. Set the 8th bit on it and you get an 8859-1 hyphen.
>
> As a result, these-words-are-separated-by-minus-signs-not-hyphens.
>
> Although this ought to be obvious, many people use - as a hypen.
> Is it worth a note in the spec.?

If there's no reason against it, I think it's worth its own
entity name. Embarrassingly enough, I was not aware that
8859-1 even *had* a hyphen character distinct from the
minus, and would gladly use the hyphen if I knew.

Perhaps it even makes sense to consider assuming that an
ASCII minus sign "-" represents a hyphen, and using an
entity reference for the minus. I haven't seen more than
perhaps a handful of HTML-2 documents that use the minus
sign as a minus. That seems likely to violate a lot of
precepts about SGML or text formatting in general, however,
so I won't push it.