Web & e-books

Short paragraphs:

For complete sentences that end with a URL: use a period, and leave a space before that period, at the end of complete sentences that end with a URL: The website address is www.something.org . (The period should be formatted in the same way as the rest of the sentence apart from the URL; that is, if the URL alone is in bold, or italic, or underlined, etc., that last period should not be, since it is part of the overall sentence. See Typography for more on this point.)

Dashes in digital text (Web and e-books): For all digital text, use the en dash with spaces. This is both to be consistent with FS Style, which recommends the en dash with spaces for all types of text, and to avoid a probem that can arise with Web-based text where words can get hyphenated in strange places if there are no spaces around the dash. What happens is that as the line width gets manipulated by the reader or the screen size of their device, the software involved will interpret dashes as letters within the words if there are no spaces around them, and break the words in confusing ways.

Sangha publishers using American English who have decided that for their printed material they will use an em dash with no spaces instead of the FS Style-recommended en dash with spaces, will need to change that convention in their digitally published text: they should choose either an en dash with spaces (recommended) or an em dash with spaces.