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> It was unclear whether you were calling the inclusion of extra > characters idiotic, or the invention of incompatible charsets in > order to express them. Both. > The former is, but before Unicode, inventing new 8-bit charsets > that were ASCII + a bunch of whatever characters were considered > necessary was something everyone did. No, it wasn't something everyone did. It was something idiots did. The right thing to do is to use © or \(co or equivalent internally and in transmission and storage formats, and deal with the mechanism for displaying either of those as a copyright symbol to the presentation level. So the file contains \''quoted text\" or &lquo;quoted text&rquo; and the user sees his curly quotes if his display and software is capable of presenting it that way. And (as I already noted) it can do the same thing with straight quotes when it believes it's appropriate. Yes, it may be mistaken. But. Since it's already doing it when it isn't appropriate and burning those mistakes in the file itself, that's definitely a lesser evil.
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