Dash It All

From The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst,

5.2.1 Use spaced en dashes – rather than em dashes or hyphens - to set off phrases.

Background

I'm re-reading The Elements of Typographic Style for the third time. Every time I learn new things based on what I have been working on in-between readings. This time the section on Dashes, Slashes and Dots really caught my eye, since I've been trying to learn how to more appropriately use these analphabetic symbols. Here's what Bringhurst has to say about a bad habit that I'd picked up somewhere:

The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed by many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.

And here is what he recommends instead:

Used a phrase marker – thus – the en dash is set with a normal word space either side.

With that advice in mind, here are a variety of HTML experiments:

em dash, no space

some text—some more text

en dash, non-breaking space

some text – some more text

hyphen, non-breaking space

some text - some more text

en dash, thinspace

some text – some more text

en dash, en space

some text – some more text

en dash, em space

some text – some more text

hyphen, thinspace

some text - some more text

Note: It shouldn't be a big surprise that Internet Explorer doesn't support thin space or en space, instead inserting what appears to be an em space.