Lars Eighner's Adult Homepage

The safest character set for text is US-ASCII. When you can stick to US-ASCII almost everyone regardless of his particular combination of computer and software can cut and paste your text into his site. You make it easier for the dumbest webmasters to use you material, and you make it easier for more skillful webmaster to make it prettier.

The first problem is that you may not know when you are using US-ASCII. Generally all the upper- and lowercase letters in the English language are safe. So too are the period, exclamation point, question mark, colon, comma, and semi-colon. Also safe are the symbols which are the shifted numbers across the top of most keyboards: @#$%^&*-()_+={}[]. These are almost certain to come out the same as US-ASCII no matter what computer, word-processor, mailing program, etc. you are using.

The problem characters are letters with accents, the apostrophe and single quotes (all the same in ASCII), double quotes, dashes, and the hyphen when it is used to break a word at the end of a line.

The assumption here is that affiliates will cut and paste your text into their blogs, which will be some form of HTML. So an HTML solution is suggested for the problem characters.

apostrophe

Unless you are sure you are certain you are sending US-ASCII, you can fall back on using the HTML character code for this ('). ' is not guaranteed to work.

hyphen for breaking words

Don't do this. If you software does this automatically, force a line break (hit Enter) before you come to the problem word. In HTML a line break is exactly the same as the space between words.

&

No doubt you know that & should be entered as & in HTML documents including links. Do not be too helpful. Dumb (and not so dumb) webmasters will be using blogging software that automatically escapes (adds the amp;) to &s. Some of it will not be smart enough to leave things alone if you already entered the amp; and the result will be & which will come out on the web page as &. Just enter naked &. This is not valid HTML and will force browsers into quirks mode, but generally will not actually break anything. Webmasters who know what they are doing and who depend on standards mode will know how to fix it. Idiots won't care.

Quotes and single quotes

These are most likely to go wrong if you use a word processor. US-ASCII doesn't recognize so-called 'curly quotes' in which the open and close marks are different. " (") is used for open double quote, close double quotes, the ditto mark and the inches symbol. ' (') is used for open and close single quotes, the apostrophe, and the feet symbol. Webmasters with smarts can make these things look pretty, but you want to avoid something that will look stupid if your webmaster is not so smart. Here are some options in HTML, but the point is, your word processor's codes will not work.

"

ASCII double quote character, use for open and close (and also as an abbreviation for inches, an abbreviation for seconds of an angle, and as a ditto mark)

“

opening curly double quote, entered as “

”

closing curly double quote, entered as ”

'

ASCII single quote character used for opening and closing and also as an abbreviation for feet or minutes of an angle.

'

curly apostrophe entered as '

'

curly apostrophe entered as '

‘

opening curly single quote

’

closing curly single quote

dash

Writing with dashes is poor literary style, but if you must — is probably the safest way to enter a dash.

ellipsis

This is the three periods in a row which indicates something is missing or a pause in dialogue. Some word processors will help you by converting this to a code that many other computers will not understand. The HTML character for … is … but if you can just put three dots in a word processor that is not overly helpful, that probably is best.