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Comment by Ennea | Hacker News Reader

"Do the first two look the same to you? It’s because some devices display them inconsistently, when the characters sit all by themselves."

And also because this article uses an en dash in the table in place of a hyphen.

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Interestingly, if I copy that first character in the table early enough in the page load, it's a hyphen. If I copy it later, it's an en dash. Considering that this article is from 2010, I assume there's some JS added in the last 12 or so years that's autoconverting it.

EDIT: Wayback confirms it's supposed to be a hyphen: https://web.archive.org/web/20120120121527/http://www.punctu...

It’s the server (probably WordPress’s fault), not JS. – is an en dash:

    $ curl -s https://www.punctuationmatters.com/en-dash-em-dash-hyphen/ | grep -A6 '<h3>What'
    <h3>What do they look like?</h3>
    <table style="height: 139px;" width="289">
    <tbody>
    <tr>
    <td><strong> &#8211;</strong></td>
    <td><strong> hyphen </strong></td>
    </tr>

I guess they respected their own recommendations: "when you're trying to illustrate what a hyphen looks like" was not one of the recommended uses of a hyphen!

I should also note that this whole point seems at best a point for typography geeks. These are three almost identical marks that have very similar uses. I am completely convinced that no one has ever disambiguated a phrase by noticing that something is a hyphen and not an en-dash or vice-versa.

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