Draft of nine new FAQ questions

[Robert J. Hansen]

On 5/23/12 6:50 PM, reynt0 wrote:
> Also, just to mention, best to avoid smart apostrophes/quotes
> in the final version, naturally, right? 

Not a whelk’s chance in a supernova.  Those aren’t smart quotes, they’re
perfectly valid UTF-8 typographic marks.

"Straight quotes" and 'straight apostrophes' are artifacts of the
typewriter era, where there was simply not enough space on the keyboard
to provide proper typographic marks.  If you read a book, you’ll
discover they pay attention to things like ligatures, kerning, proper
typographic marks, and all manner of other things.  Centuries of use
have shown that these marks make text easier to read.

The final version that gets submitted to Werner will by necessity be
plain text, and that will probably get downshifted into dumb typewriter
markings.  But so long as I’m going blind on it, reading those rows of
text again and again and again, I’m going to pay attention to the
typography.

I encourage anyone who’s writing web pages to abjure dumb typewriter
markings.  In the UTF-8 era, there’s absolutely no reason why any of us
should have to put up with them.