in the trouble with em ‘n en and other shady characters we learn more than we ever wanted to know about strange html entities and also that

the web has also destroyed one of the greatest features of nearly every press since gutenberg: the ability to publish pleasing type. however i’m most entralled that there are no less than fifteen different types of space defined in unicode. they’re all listed on this unicode test page. i must be missing the point in defining all these spaces. an em space is 12 point wide. an en space is only 6 points wide. can’t we just put two en spaces in to make an em space? we could use the zero width breaking or non breaking spaces in between to get the effect that we’re after. it seems a waste of numbers to me. unicode is only a 31 bit character set after all…

i’m pleased to find that my browser can display russian, ancient greek and chinese but disappointed that i can’t see sanskrit. i don’t know why i’m disappointed. i can’t read any of them after all.

the list of the characters supported by unicode includes those used by the languages “unified canadian aboriginal syllabic” and “ogham” among many others.