We all studied grammar at school and punctuation was an important part of it. But majority neglects the rules of correct punctuation online. And I am not talking about instant messaging, forums or chats. My attention catches blog posts and respectable websites once in a while. Well, I am not that nerd who will notice missed dot or comma. But putting minus instead of dash or inch symbol instead of quotation marks is not serious at all. To tell the truth, it is just so much more appealing with correct characters.

Here I wrote a short but handy list of HTML entities I use.

1. The first place I give to unbreakable space which, I assume, is known to everyone. I use it when I write someone’s First and Last name — which should be always on the same line, or before dash — as you can leave dash at the end of line but can’t start a new line with it, etc.

    

2. Dash is my second most usable entity. Forget about minus (-) and use dash instead.

   — (—) and short dash – (–)

3. The next step is to get rid of inch symbol and use correct quotation marks. There are two types of them: Latin and Cyrillic .

   Left double quotation mark “ (“) or &laquo («);
   right double quotation mark ” (”) or » (»);
   single quotation mark ‘ (‘) and ’ (’).

4. One of mistakes I made before and I see other people still doing is putting three dots for ellipsis. There is, actually, an HTML entity for that and it looks different from just three dots in a raw.

   … (…)

5. The last but not least is a copyright symbol. I still see websites which use something like (c) or (C).

   © (©)

So that was my top 5 list of HTML entities which I use. I guess most of us — designers/developers know them. Just wanted to remind them to those who does the markup or blogs a lot.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 4:01 pm and is filed under web, HTML. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.