From: Michael Maxwell (mmaxwell@casl.umd.edu)
Date: Mon Feb 05 2007 - 07:40:04 CST
Hans Aberg wrote:
> Though Unicode has decided to recommend the right single
> quotation mark U+2019 to double as punctuation apostrophe,
> they are semantically different, and even though it may seem
> clever with such doubling in a more narrow context, when the
> context widens, some problems may ensue. Now, in the case of
> this particular character, the problems may very great, but
> it may still be annoying.
>
> For example, parsing text becomes ambiguous, problematic for
> computer programs. If correct parsing is needed for further
> processing, there will be annoying failures, and if those
> should be removed, one will have to set humans together with
> some computer language extensions, removing those ambiguities
> by hand, which might hev been eliminated in the first place.
But how are you going to eliminate them "in the first place"? I see two
choices: either automatically, or by hand. If it can be done
automatically in the first place, then it could be done automatically
during parsing. And I suspect the chances of getting document authors
to do it right by hand are slim, particularly since the two characters
would look identical on the screen (at least in a WYSIWYG editor; I
suppose you could use a character entity in a non-WYSIWYG editor). And
if people mess up, then the parsing problem is even worse, because the
parser can't know which of the two characters it should be.
Mike Maxwell
CASL/ U Md
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