2 ms·
> the very simplicity of ASCII can make unicode difficult to grasp. Somewhat related: I hate "smart" "quotes". I find myself editing them into plain old << " >
by euroderf 3y ago
> the very simplicity of ASCII can make unicode difficult to grasp.
Somewhat related: I hate "smart" "quotes". I find myself editing them into plain old << " >> and << ' >>.
If you want to use "smart" quotes to add semantic meaning to text - as in "this is a quote" - then you should be using markup to do the job. Stop abusing non-ASCII typography so you can pretend to write "semantic" material that you think will impress all the cool kids that know structured documentation.
Who else remembers that great Perl script, "The Demoronizer" ?
- chrismorgan 3y agoI too hate “smart quotes”, meaning anything that automatically converts from ASCII, but only for myself. That’s because I’m a weirdo that types exactly what I mean, things like em dashes and en dashes and curly quotes and such, using my Compose key. Opening and closing quotation marks are different from one another (simple fact, true from the very early days of quotation marks), so they should be represented differently in Unicode (simple fact). Anything along the lines of “smart quotes” is just a pragmatic approach to let normal people get the correct quotation marks, and I’m mostly glad they can have it (I just wish it’d handle things like “’cos” and “’90s” properly, which use an apostrophe which is equivalent to a right single quotation mark; but other than that, I’m glad when people use curly quotes rather than straight quotes), so long as I don’t have to have it (and I’m glad to say I don’t).