* Luke Kanies <l...@madstop.com> [2005-10-19 00:10]: > All typography is a relatively recent invention; hell, > punctuation itself isn't all that old, relative to typewriters,
Excuse me? Typography as we know it today exists since Gutenberg; even the history of commercial font foundries goes back a century before the typewriter. Further, a lot of the rules of this relatively new form of typograhpy borrow from prior conventions established when copying manuscripts was laborious manual work. And the choice and placement of quotes is a grammatic rule. Half a millenium of prior art and craft was pragmatically sacrified to the limitations of constructing a mechanical device. But a computer does not have those. We can do better now. > and certainly any sort of established standard is painfully > recent, so specifically using a more annoying form of > punctuation because of bitterness towards typewriters seems > unjustifiably cruel to those of us who have to suffer through > them. It's only a problem because of lackluster Unicode support. Which I'm relying on to begin with because as noted elsewhere, I write mail in Greek and German as well as English, and sometimes a combination of several of those within a single mail. I use curly quotes because writing in Unicode means they're available to me anyway. What I've found, if it's of interest, is that in mail, Unicode is somewhat hit-and-miss yet; a substantial amount of people who get my mail have problems, maybe as many as a third. (Also, mailing list archives are frothing hateful about this.) But it works much more reliably on the whole than you'd expect. Most GUI mailers, in particular, work smoothly. (I suppose that explains why I've had more complaints on this list than anywhere else, by a *long* shot.) On the web, OTOH, support is solid. If the publishing setup (at least the webserver, if it's just static files) at a site is configured correctly, all browsers do the right thing. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
