Welcome, Harry. Have fun.

Welcome, indeed. Looking forward to your contributions with regard to webdesign.

Harry — Welcome. I’ve just taken a look at your Web Design + document. Lots of good stuff there. I have two typographic quibbles for you.

(1) In §10.1, you offer this about the Em: “a relative measure defined as A unit of measurement used in typesetting, approximately the width of the letter ‘m’.” This is an oft-repeated, but completely bogus definition.

The value of an em has nothing to do with the width of the letter ‘m’. The traditional definition is “a relative measure equal to the point size of the type in question.” You might enjoy this essay on the Em by type designer Cyrus Highsmith.

You’ll be hard pressed to find a typeface with an ‘m’ that measure anywhere near an em. You’ll have slightly better luck finding an ‘M’ that is approximately an em in width. But that definition is still apocryphal.

The rest of your section shows an adequate understanding of the em; it’s just this definition which is a pet peeve of mine.

(2) In §10.3 iii, you state “An ellipsis is commonly mistaken for three full-stops, when in actual fact it is a whole character unto itself.” This is not entirely true.

While there may be very good reasons to advocate the use of the encoded composite ellipsis character, this argument is not in the same class as the others. Proper quotations marks are semantically different from primes. En & em dashes have distinctly different roles from hyphens, et al. The same is not true, however, for the ellipsis vs. three full stops.

Historically and traditionally, an ellipsis in text — that is, an omission or a sudden shift in thought — has been represented by three full stops. You will not find a metal sort that is three periods cast together. There is no place for such a sort in a type case. You will not find a keyboard position on a Linotype or Monotype machine for an ellipsis character.

I can’t be absolutely certain about phototypesetting; but I’m pretty sure that the concept of a separate ellipsis glyph is recent and digital. It is not an editorial or grammatical development.

As I say, there are very good reasons to use a non-breaking encoded ellipsis glyph in web pages. But the use of three full stops is not semantically incorrect.

The [often poorly considered] design of the ellipsis glyph in digital fonts is a separate discussion. We’ve had lively debates about the ellipsis before. For instance, see http://typophile.com/node/42278.

Some will think me old-fashioned for clinging to some of these minor points, but you’re young and bright, and I thought you should be presented with this perspective.

— K.

Hi Harry,
As someone quite new to this forum myself, be warned, Typophile can be incredibly addictive! And as illustrated by Kent also incredibly helpful.

Thank you Kent for those insights. I thought the name of the Em dash referenced some historical relationship to the M. Glad to be corrected!

I’m pretty sure that the concept of a separate ellipsis glyph is recent and digital.

Without any specific knowledge, I would have guessed it comes from advanced typewriters.

Riccardo — I'm not sure what the impetus would be for “inventing” a composed ellipsis for advanced typewriters.

I quickly checked a few references for the Selectric series and I didn’t see any evidence that they went beyond ASCII in their character sets. Perhaps some other did.

I think the only value of a pre-composed ellipsis comes when you have a computer making the line-break choices (and no way to tell it that three spaced full stops should not break). I believe that even the most advanced justifying typewriters still relied on human operators to make decisions about line breaks.

I'm not sure what the impetus would be for “inventing” a composed ellipsis for advanced typewriters.

Perhaps typesetting documents with lots of omissis […] ;-)