Weird characters [LWN.net]

Weird characters

Posted Apr 7, 2004 18:43 UTC (Wed) by Ross (subscriber, #4065)
In reply to: Weird characters by corbet
Parent article: X.Org Foundation releases X Window System X11R6.7

They are in Microsoft's own proprietary character set which is almost, but
not quite, the same as ISO Latin-1. Most Microsoft products silently
insert these proprietary quotes if you have the smart quotes option turned
on. It's much better to use HTML entities with Unicode numbers for curly
quotes or to just use plain ASCII quotes. There's an old script call the
Demoronizer which fixes up problems like these.

What's interesting is that the newer Mozilla releases have capitulated.
They now interpret those quotes "correctly" even if the page's character
set marks those characters as reserved. Kind of sad actually.

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“ ” ‘ ’ work on everything I have here

Posted Apr 9, 2004 4:21 UTC (Fri) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link]

That's what OpenOffice's HTML editor uses, so I've taken to using them in my own HTML, and not found anything that blips yet. Konqeror seems to know enough to replace them with straight quotes if the charset doesn't support them. What does your browser show?

"straight quotes"

“double curlies”

'apostrophes'

‘single curlies’

“ ” ‘ ’ work on everything I have here

Posted Apr 9, 2004 16:32 UTC (Fri) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

Yes, all those show up correctly. However the original document didn't use
them -- it used raw 8-bit characters in the reserved range. But as for what
HTML entities to use, “ is even more portable than “.