Re: Wish List for New Spec

Walter Ian Kaye (boo@best.com)
Wed, 27 Dec 1995 21:01:31 -0800


At 6:11p 12/27/95, Ben Breakstone wrote:

>I believe the absence of typesetter's (or "curly," or "smart") quotation
>marks from the english HTML entity set to be a grievous omission.

The entity names for curly quotes may be undecided as yet, but the decimal
codes (Unicode) are defined. Visit:

<URL:http://www.natural-innovations.com/boo/doc-charset.html>

with a table-supporting browser to find out what they are.

>The second reason is semantic: typsetter's quotation marks carry much more
>information than the other kind. The direction of single or double "smart
>quotes" indicates whether they begin or end a block of speech, or whether a
>single mark is acting as an apostrophe. "Dumb quotes," on the other hand,
>provide no clue as to their context.

(flame on)
A number of Unix and WWW docs (and some people on this list) try to fake it
by using the ASCII grave accent mark as if it were a true left quote, but
in most typefaces this looks absolutely horrible and I get ill every time I
see it. :/
Such usage is both bad English and invalid programming syntax. I wish
people would stop doing this abomination, and I wish I could do a
worldwide, global search and replace on all existing docs that use this
awful hack. ::sigh::
(flame off)

-Walter

__________________________________________________________________________
Walter Ian Kaye <boo@best.com> | Excel | FoxPro | AppleScript |
Mountain View, CA |--------- programmer ---------|
http://www.natural-innovations.com/ | Macintosh | Windows |