why is discogs displaying an en dash instead of a hyphen?

why on earth did discogs start using an en dash "–" as a separator instead of a standard hyphen "-" ?

now every time I copy and paste an artist - title I have to change it to a hyphen.

I think there was a discussion on this a few months ago, can't find the topic.

found this one: http://discogs.cinepelis.org/help/forums/topic/230481

"typographically correct" facepalm

another reason why "professional designers" need to learn more about accessibility and usability and how print design is very different from web design...

Honestly I would love to work for Discogs, but I live on the east coast and my past harsh criticism of management could be a liability.

fuck hyphens and all their incorrect usage.

All-Day
another reason why "professional designers" need to learn more about accessibility and usability and how print design is very different from web design

Uh-huh.
I'm all ears for your expert knowledge then.

All-Day
now every time I copy and paste an artist - title I have to change it to a hyphen

Oh dear! Why that? Still using Windows 95…?

loukash
I'm all ears for your expert knowledge then.

I don't believe you, but it's pretty simple: ascii is good for accessibility and portability of data; using an unnecessary en dash as a field separator is not. discogs.cinepelis.org is not a magazine, it's a front end for accessing a large set of structured data.

imo, it improves readability.

ascii is rather a retro thing... I like ascii art a lot, but I don't use ascii for anything these days, as unicode does all ascii does and more...

All-Day
ascii is good for accessibility and portability of data

Welcome to the 21st century: http://unicode.org/
Discogs is Unicode compatible for years now.
En-dash is included in virtually any standard font these days. Not sure about Windows, but on every Macintosh I've been using since 1988, I was able to type, display, and print an en-dash. And as long as a web site was coded properly (i.e. with the suitable charset tag in the head section), I've never seen an en-dash displayed incorrectly ever since I've began to browse Teh Interwebz™ in the late 1990s.

All-Day
it's a front end for accessing a large set of structured data.

No, you are talking about the front end for viewing the data. Any modern web browser complying with the web standards is able to display discogs.cinepelis.org properly. (Which of course excludes about a billion of Chinese still stuck with their pirated copies of Windblowz 98 and Internet Exploder 6, but there you go… ;)

If you want to access the data, you must go here: http://discogs.cinepelis.org/help/api
And there's no en-dash separator.
But you will have to deal with quite a bunch of other strange Unicode characters you may have never seen before, stored with many actual data records: Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Cyrillic, … you name it. And quite a few en-dashes as well for sure. (I for one use them frequently in the release notes…)

So, if you have already problems with the separator en-dash, you will likely have really serious problems with a big part of the actual data submitted in the aforementioned languages.

Dr.SultanAszazin
it improves readability.

Exactly. It's just a display thing. There's no connection to the data whatsoever.

Dr.SultanAszazin
imo, it improves readability.

looks the same to me. i didn't even notice a difference until i tried to copy & paste a Main Artist - Main Title.

EDIT:fixed wrong quoted (i must'a clicked the wrong button)