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Mdash as a Service

mdash.tsak.dev15 points3 comments
Screenshot of Mdash as a Service

This is a playful product site that treats punctuation as a cloud commodity: a catalog of five Unicode dashes (hyphen-minus U+002D, en dash U+2013, em dash U+2014, two-em U+2E3A and three-em U+2E3B) each “minted” and tracked on a faux blockchain called the Dashchain. Each dash has a brief use case - ranges and connections for en dashes, dramatic pauses for em dashes, redaction or bibliographic repetition for multi-em dashes - and copy buttons. Live status counters (dashes served, ems dispensed, Dashchain height and latest block) and tongue-in-cheek warnings (em dashes may make readers assume a language model wrote your text; two- and three-em dashes may not render in all fonts) underscore the satire.

The site offers a RESTful, content-negotiated API with formats including plain text, JSON, XML, CSV, HTML and SVG, examples for upgrading keys, streaming via Server-Sent Events, and endpoints for DashCorrect™, a regex-powered, AI-free typography fixer that swaps hyphens for proper dashes and applies house styles (American closed em dash or British spaced en dash). Pricing is deliberately absurd: Hobbyist, Pro and Enterprise plans all cost $0 with varied limits, SLAs and “support.” Legal fine print disclaims warranties; the project is credited to tsak.dev and framed as humorous commentary on serviceification and typographic pedantry.

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