Microsoft news site prepared using Macs

I just read this article relating to how MS would want to challange Google on the subject of search engines... HA-HA ! Upon reading this, it came to mind again how pissed Bill Gates was when the world learned that his Hotmail service would run on BSD instead of Windows servers, although this isn't really related.

Because I was obviously bored (as you will see in a second..) I followed the suggested link at the bottom of the article as well (Vole goes crackers on MSNBC). And then it immediately struck me that his little pet called MSNBC isn't being produced on Windows either but on Macs instead. Now, this is a highly unscientific approach, since I don't know anything about web design at all, but maybe that makes my reasoning about it interesting in the first place.. :-)

OK, lets have a look at the very first line of the linked article of:

this article

It reads: April 2 — Microsoft Corp., the world's No. 1

This line is a little tell-tale. I copy/pasted it right from the page and you may ask what's so special about it. We'll see...

Take a look again at the MSNBC page, they use what is called a dash. From a typo perspective this is correct, although most people are not aware that there is a difference between a dash and a hyphen. Not even all the journos are aware. Now, why is that? The reason is, because you won't find a dash on a standard MS-keyboard, hence, always if people like you and me are in use of a dash, they actually take the hyphen. I quickly sorted out two INQ articles where you can clearly see that while for example Mr Paul Hales is aware of the difference of dash and hyphen, he helps himself via using two hyphens instead of a dash, because two hyphens are approximately as long as a dash (always in the 1st or 2nd paragraph):

1
2
There ought to be a "real" dash somewhere hidden away in the extra symbols of the Windows character set. But if Paul doesn't know where, being a journo, and I don't know where although I tamper with OSs all day long and many people who grew up on the Windows platform don't know about the difference in the first place, I can make a few educated guesses, although I don't nothing about your Web design nor the one of MSNBC: The first is that Paul Hales is using MS products to write his articles.

The second one it that MSNBC is being created on Macs. Now why is that? Although I am not a media desinger, the place where I am living is stuffed with these people. And one of my neighbours has quite a typo fetish. And the reason why he would NEVER buy a PC, but always Mac is because for little details that make all the difference in his job: Namely he has a "real" dash on his G4 key board and actually this little difference alone was enough reason for him to buy an Apple because he wouldn't know where to find it on a PC.

Now, if you are into lay-outing of books and such stuff, the difference in dashes and hyphen can be really important.

Coming back to my theory: The only reason why the MSNBC article is making use of the dash is because the person creating the web page has a dash on his key-board readily at hand in the first place, meaning he is working on a Mac. It's not like these MSNBC pages are special in any way. They probably write the article in a matter of minutes and if there wasn't a dash, they would't go out searching for it every single time, they would take the hyphen - or double it like Paul --

So, now somebody go out and tell Bill all about it... or maybe not. Probably he'll kill them off like he did with the poor FreeBSD Hotmail servers.

Sorry, I know I'm crazy... ;-) But now I am not bored any more and the post office opened meantime, so I can leave the house and sort my stuff...

Matthias Toth
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