It also puts every single special character into its own span. That may negatively affect programs that trust HTML for copy-paste, for example Open Office, Micr

It also puts every single special character into its own span. That may negatively affect programs that trust HTML for copy-paste, for example Open Office, Microsoft Word (I think?), some IM clients, some text editors, etc. Doesn't seem worth it in the general case. That said, if those sorts of things bother an individual, they could run that on the page themselves, I suppose, so it's good for that :)