`—` or `—` is there any difference in HTML output?

html ascii
Adam Ramadhan picture Adam Ramadhan · Nov 9, 2010 · Viewed 141.1k times · Source

— or —

Is there a difference between these? Is one better-supported than the other?

Answer

Quentin picture Quentin · Nov 9, 2010

SGML parsers (or XML parsers in the case of XHTML) can handle — without having to process the DTD (which doesn't matter to browsers as they just slurp tag soup), while — is easier for humans to read and write in the source code.

Personally, I would stick to a literal em-dash and ensure that my character encoding settings were consistent.

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