External online style guide reference

[jswisher]

In the Preferred style guides section of the MDN Writing style guide, we have a link to The Economist Style Guide, which is now a dead link, as that guide is now available only in a paper edition.

Our other fallback style guide is the Chicago Manual of Style, also only available in paper, or by paid subscription.

I think it is helpful to content contributors to have a recommended free online resource for writing style issues not covered in our house guide. But they generally depend on the generosity of publishers, and therefore are impermanent.

Any thoughts on whether to recommend an external online style guide, and if so, which one?

A few candidates:

• Wikipedia Manual of Style — designed for reference material; will never go away, but details may be subject to Wikipedia politics.
• National Geographic Style Manual — designed for somewhat technical topics, though not technology-specific; dependent on National Geographic’s generosity.
• Microsoft Writing Style Guide — explicitly for technology topics; forkable on GitHub in the event that Microsoft ever withdraws it.

[chrisdavidmills]

I rather like the Microsoft Style Guide; looking at it, I think we agree with most of it on MDN.

[sheppy (Eric Shepherd)]

Microsoft’s guide looks reasonable, for the most part. There are exceptions we make though. for instance:

• It recommends use cases for en-dashes, which we never use at all. We just use the hyphen (minus) character where they recommend the en-dash.
• They encourage headings structured like “To do such-and-such” or “To bake better brownies”, whereas we use “Doing such-and-such” or “Baking better brownies”

But yes, for the most part, I like it. I would say we should provide the link to it but also have a list of exceptions nearby.

[jswisher]

The key phrase is “usage and style not covered here”. If we make those things explicit in our style guide, there should be no need to refer to another guide about them.

BTW, nobody ever told me not to use en-dashes, though I can’t remember ever trying to use them.

[sheppy (Eric Shepherd)]

I think it’s mostly that we just don’t encourage the en-dash. I don’t think I’ve ever typed one on purpose. I’ve always just used the minus key.

[chrisdavidmills]

I always use en-dashes where required. I’m pretty anal about that type of thing

[exe-boss]

I sometimes use en‑dashes when writing on a computer.

I also tend to use   and ‑ (No‑break hyphen) characters quite a bit.