22871 - Use an em-dash rather than a hyphen as the Navigator window title seperator character

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, defect, P2)

Description

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

Sorry if this is the wrong component.

The title seperator ' - ' (which are used to seperate a page or e-mail title
and "Mozilla" in the titlebar) should be ' – '. Currently it's set to 'space
hyphen-minus space', but it should be 'space en-dash space'. The en-dash is
U+2013. A en dash is typographically correct, wheras a hypen is not!

This could be fixed by changing all 'titleSeperator.label' (and similar)
entities to ' – '.

Comment 1

[Peter Trudelle]

Hey Don, doesn't Ben Goodger own this?

Comment 2

[leger]

BULK MOVE: Changing component from XUL to XP Toolkit/Widgets: XUL.  XUL 
component will be deleted.

Comment 3

[Chris McAfee]

m20.

Comment 4

[Paul MacQuiddy]

*IGNORE* - more massive spam, changing open XPToolkit bug's QA contact to
[e-mail]

Comment 5

[don]

Move to M21 target milestone.

Comment 6

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

[--> XP Apps: GUI]

Comment 7

[Viswanath Ramachandran]

Since Don has left, Vishy is taking his bugs in bulk, pending reassignment.
thanks,
	Vishy

Comment 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

There are three of these, in Editor, Navigator and Messenger.

/editor/ui/composer/locale/en-US/editor.dtd, line 26
/xpfe/browser/resources/locale/en-US/navigator.dtd, line 11
/mailnews/base/resources/locale/en-US/messenger.dtd, line 23 

Can anyone tell me how to represent this character in a DTD? Are they UTF-8?

Gerv

Comment 9

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

> Can anyone tell me how to represent this character
> in a DTD? Are they UTF-8?

Yes, but you can use numerical character references. – or –

Comment 10

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

It doesn't like:
<!ENTITY titleSeperator.label " &#8211 ">
or
<!ENTITY titleSeperator.label " &#x2013 ">
at all :-(

"XML Parsing error: error in processing external entity reference"

:-( 

Gerv

Comment 11

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

> It doesn't like:
> <!ENTITY titleSeperator.label " &#8211 ">

You forgot the ;. It should be &#8211;

Comment 12

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Ah. Doh!

That works, but on Windows at least, it looks exactly the same. Is that to be 
expected?

Gerv

Comment 13

[timeless]

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.htm
l+en+dash+entity&hl=en
<!ENTITY ndash   CDATA "&#8211;" -- en dash, U+2013 ISOpub -->
why aren't we using &ndash; ?

Comment 14

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

> <!ENTITY ndash   CDATA "&#8211;" -- en dash, U+2013 ISOpub -->
> why aren't we using &ndash; ?

Because &ndash; is only an *HTML* (and DocBook) named entity. XML has only 
*four* named entities. We have to create others ourselves, and that's exactly 
what we're doing with:

<!ENTITY titleSeperator.label " &#8211; ">

Regarding it being displayed as an ordinary dash, I think this may have 
something to do with glyph substitution. If the font doesn't contain an en-dash 
glyph, a dash is used instead.

Comment 15

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Does that mean we shouldn't bother? Or will there be cases in the future where 
the titlebar font does have the right glyph?

Gerv

Comment 16

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

> Or will there be cases in the future where 
> the titlebar font does have the right glyph?

Probably yes. Doesn't Windows 2000 use the Tahoma font? (Which *does* include 
an en-dash.)

Comment 17

[timeless]

i'd prefer for us to define ndash and use it.
<!ENTITY ndash   CDATA "&#8211;" -- en dash, U+2013 ISOpub -->
<!ENTITY titleSeperator.label " &ndash; ">

does anyone have an objection to this?

Comment 18

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Is there some global file we can declare it in, or do we have to declare it
three times? It just seems like a bit of a waste of effort; we could just add a
comment saying which entity it was.

Gerv

Comment 19

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

> i'd prefer for us to define ndash and use it.
> <!ENTITY ndash   CDATA "&#8211;" -- en dash, U+2013 ISOpub -->
> <!ENTITY titleSeperator.label " &ndash; ">

Excuse me for asking, but *why*?

(I have no objection, but I'm wondering why you want to define it this way.)

Comment 20

[timeless]

clarity and future use. wrt better candidates for placing that entity: i dunno.

Comment 21

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Attachment: patch for editor.dtd, messenger.dtd, navigator.dtd

Comment 22

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

OK, so it's not a major issue - so we should be able to check it in and get on 
with life. r=? sr=?

The current patches use lines of the form:
<!ENTITY editorWindow.titlemodifiermenuseparator " &#8211; "> <!-- en-dash -->
which seems like a reasonable compromise. If ever we find there's a central 
place for defining entities, we'll shift it out there.

Gerv

Comment 23

[Dan Rosen]

Gerv: I'm taking this. Your patch is more or less fine, but it won't work at all
on linux due to bug 74753. And I don't want to fix 74172 either until 74753 is
fixed, for obvious reasons :(

Comment 24

[Greg K.]

Actually, this bug is not quite right. The three dashes have well-defined and
standard usages in text.

The shortest, the hyphen, is used to signal adjectives or substantives composed
of several words or to separate a word across two successive lines of text.

The n-dash is used to indicate a duration or an extend between two limits. A
small space should be present before and after the n-dash.

The m-dash, largest of the dashes, is reserved for the isolation of portion of
clauses: it is pratically equivalent to parenthesis. There are no spaces before
or after the m-dash in English texts.

Thus it should be plain that the separator character between the document TITLE
and the Mozilla/Build ID blurb must be the m-dash.

Comment 25

[Greg K.]

Actually, this bug is not quite right. The three dashes have well-defined and
standard usages in text.

The shortest, the hyphen, is used to signal adjectives or substantives composed
of several words or to separate a word across two successive lines of text.

The n-dash is used to indicate a duration or an extend between two limits. A
small space should be present before and after the n-dash.

The m-dash, largest of the dashes, is reserved for the isolation of portion of
clauses: it is pratically equivalent to parenthesis. There are no spaces before
or after the m-dash in English texts.

Thus it should be plain that the separator character between the document TITLE
and the Mozilla/Build ID blurb must be the m-dash.

Comment 26

[Dan Rosen]

R!

Comment 27

[Greg K.]

I see this bug is now assigned to me. I'm not sure how this happened...it's
possible I accepted it by mistake, but who konws.

Should I edit the attached patch and replace the n-dash entities with m-dashes?

Comment 28

[Greg K.]

Attachment: Revised patch of same using em-dash rather than en-dash.

Comment 29

[Greg K.]

Changed patch to use em-dashes rather than en-dashes. Although not technically
correct, I left the padding whitespace on either side in case some platform
resolves it to a hyphen.

Comment 30

[Håkan Waara]

Dan Rosen ([e-mail]) reassigned it to you for whatever reason. :)

Comment 31

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Invalid. All other Windows apps use a hyphen, including 4.x, and being 
inconsistent with them wouldn't improve usability at all (in fact it would 
decrease usability by a couple of pixels:-).

Comment 32

[Greg K.]

Although the idea of closing XP bugs because of Windows standards is itself
invalid, in fact it's entirely inappropriate to have the application name in
text in Mac OS title bar text, anyway. Thus, bug 107695.

Comment 33

[Ondrej Novy]

I think this bug should be reopen. Now Linux vs. titlebar bug is fixed, and it '-' should be replaced with en-dash or em-dash. Yes, Windows is using '-' everywhere, but i want to have my Firefox in Linux typographical right and nevermind that Microsoft id*ots.