Re: Significant whitespace (was Re: Blogging sucks)

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From: Luke Kanies
Subject: Re: Significant whitespace (was Re: Blogging sucks)
Date: 16:02 on 17 Oct 2005
On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, A. Pagaltzis wrote:

> This is a straight apostrophe: '
> This is a curly apostrophe: =E2=80=99

Can you explain to me why you or anyone else would bother using a curly
apostrophe?  Is the key more conveniently placed?  Do you just like annoyin=
g
people who are stuck with stupider interfaces and/or software?

> > I get this in Aristotle's emails (gibberish instead of '),
>
> It=E2=80=99s because your mailer sucks. (Are you surprised?)

I'm guessing Pine has no relationship to whether this works; I'm thinking
instead that it's the terminal itself.  But I don't know, and I'm not likel=
y
to spend the hours and hours it would take to find out and then fix every
terminal I have.

> Because either the webserver/CMS config is borked so it sends the
> wrong charset (surprise!) or whoever wrote the HTML document used
> mixed charsets (well, can=E2=80=99t blame them too hard, charsets aren=E2=
=80=99t
> stuff your mum or the ACME Corp CEO should have to to understand).

Grr.  It just seems stupid to screw with a character that was already
working fine in the lower bits.  I feel similarly but not quite as bitter
about people who do stupid "smart" quotes, because wow they're bloody
annoying to handle with parsing programs.

--=20
That was just a drill of the emergency y2k system.  Had this been a
real emergency, we would've also dumped a bucket of spiders on you and
yelled out "civilization is collapsing!"
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://config-mgmt.blogspot.com

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