Em dash

I see far too much writing on the web using “--” instead of “—”. Most software out there now copes quite happily with UTF-8, so there's no technical reason not to use the “EM DASH” glyph. Actually, I lie, it's less convenient because most keyboards don't have a “—” key, but do have a “-” key. In vim, you can use the “-M” digraph, and in GNOME I find the Character Palette panel applet nearly as handy. Or in HTML-land just use “—” if you prefer.

So, this is a public service announcement: use a real em dash, not the ugly double hyphen. Thank you.

Unicode: it's not just for non-English speakers, it's for punctuation pedants too!