Thread: no real apostrophe for computers?!

  1. #16
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mario F. View Post
    Yeah, I'm counting the hyphen there. So three "dashes". Should probably also include the minus sign.
    I don't own a printer or have a word processor installed, so I am quite happy with pure ASCII.

    Of course, in most languages other than English that won't fly so well, but I still don't see a need to invoke unicode for solutions to "problems" like the quote or the minus sign/dash. These seem much, much less significant that the need for (eg) the accent circonflexe or something.
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  2. #17
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    I've lived through typewriters, and no, they did not support multitudes of quotes and apostrophes. In fact today's keyboards are very similar.
    See example:
    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...typewriter.jpg

    Also, as far as ASCII goes, when it was developed during the mechanical limitations of teletypes - again, very limited character set at the time.

    In HTML you have a better choice:

    ’ - nice apostrophe
    “ - double quotes are like little 6s
    ” - double quotes are like little 9s
    – - a proper dash instead of the shorter 'minus' sign

    So these should be used in proper written style instead of the default stuff that comes straight from a keyboard.

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