Curly Quotes

Problem: Wanting to convert 'single' and "double" hash marks into proper CurlyQuotes on the Wiki.

Example: ‘single’ “double”

UniCode example: ‘single’ “double”

Consideration: Does anyone’s browser mis-display them? Seems like it should be fine, but we don’t want to assume.

Those are non-ASCII characters. I do see them with InternetExplorer, but when I cut/paste into a Unix telnet session window or into notepad, the double quotes just turn into garbage. I would also expect them to fail on MacIntoshes (which have double-quotes like that, but use different char codes to represent them) and on Unix systems.

There is no appropriate way to do this sort of thing (use any non-ASCII character at all) short of using UniCode, which, alas, is still not quite universally-used enough to justify using it for this, either.

Sorry, but this is a bad idea.

bummer - Works fine on my OS 10.2/SafariBrowser Mac. Safari supports UniCode though. I knew they weren't ASCII, but thought the encoding might be more universal.

They also work fine in MozillaFirefox 0.9 on Windows (98 and XP), and when cut/pasted from Firefox into notepad.

The question isn't whether the author can see the correct result, the question is whether everyone else on different platforms sees the same thing, vs seeing garbage, due to character set differences.
The web does allow for stating character set, but how well this works in practice is questionable due to varying support, so even if people on 3 platforms say everything is working, that's still insufficient confirmation. I can see correctly-displayed APL characters on some web pages, but most people can't; it depends on configuration (fonts installed, etc etc). Beware false positives.

That's why UniCode is nice, when you know you can rely on people being able to view it. It is literally the first universal character encoding, that's its whole point. There is no other one (although perforce we act as if AsciiCode is, since we have little other choice).

Be aware that the raw wiki page text is used by more than just the engine of WardsWiki. Auxiliary scripts like SignatureSurvey use the data, too. Converting straight quotes to curly quotes probably won't affect them, but you never know who's assumed what about the data.

Last word for now as of Summer 2004: Stick to AsciiCode characters on the wiki.

Absolutely the last word from May 2006: Stick to UniCode characters on the wiki.

CategoryWikiEditing