Date: 08 Feb 2002 19:33:06 -0800 From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: "Michael Kobas" <michael238@ozemail.com.au> Cc: <doc@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Use of quotation marks in FAQ Message-ID: <ujadujwcr1.duj@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <005101c1b0f3$b7ea1f40$d4cd223f@home> References: <005101c1b0f3$b7ea1f40$d4cd223f@home>
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"Michael Kobas" <michael238@ozemail.com.au> writes: > Your FAQ has "quotation marks" which show up as ``quotation marks" on > Windows and modern Macintosh systems. You should use Unicode > conventions, or update your fonts. I think you should read > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html. It will explain the > problem, and show you how to fix it. It's hard to not respond in anger to the hubris reflected by such comments (above and moreso in the referenced document), especially when so many users (if not the two authors above -- I don't know) of "modern" systems refuse to follow existing standards for character encoding, etc., so that many of us see web pages peppered with question marks from illegally-encoded characters. But it's good to have such things brought to our attention and I hope Michael's comments will be well considered. (It also bugs me that the Unicode people have claimed to incorporate ASCII, but we find out that the character they call "apostrophe" is not the character they want used for the apostrophe glyph. But this is at least a reasonable compromise; maybe even the best of a bad lot.) But the referenced document does make a good case for not using the (single or double) grave-apostrophe pair, despite the hubris and snide remarks and several errors which are not important here. And the above quote shows that there is an additional "feature" in many browsers (including Netscape for Linux on FreeBSD, BTW) which causes two adjacent apostrophe characters to be displayed as a single double quote. We could say "get your browswers fixed" or change our quoting to make it easier for all (?) but some text-browsers to read. I, for one, have never liked the use of the (single or double) grave in quoting, even in ASCII text and prefer reading the more usual quotes like 'this' and "this". I suspect that more of our fonts will be changing to use vertical strokes for the ASCII quotes so that their appearance in text will only improve with time. I'd like to see the FDP stop using the grave character for quoting as it looks wierd in the increasing number of systems that show the closing quote as vertical marks (and it looks wierd even in those that don't, IMO). To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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