Apostrophes at www.unicode.org

From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Wed Aug 22 2007 - 05:58:43 CDT

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    I noticed that the page http://www.unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html
    contains the APOSTROPHE U+0027 in many of the names of the translations
    (e.g. Albanian, French, Italian, Maltese) as well as elsewhere. I did no
    find any obvious feedback address and, moreover, this seems to be a matter
    of principle rather than just a technical fix.

    Since the Unicode Standard says that RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK U+2019 is
    the preferred character for a punctuation apostrophe, shouldn't the
    Unicode Consortium's web pages use that character? Especially on pages
    that demonstrate the power of Unicode in presenting texts in different
    languages correctly.

    The question extends to the translations themselves, which use U+0027. On
    monolingual pages in a Latin script, the use of U+0027 as a
    typographically wrong but "safe" replacement for U+2019 might be
    defendable, though support to U+2019 is fairly universal now (in web
    browsers and in fonts).

    Note: The pages seem to use the character reference ' instead of
    U+0027 itself. I have seen many people assume that this makes a difference
    and that ' is the proper character for a punctuation character. Yet in
    reality it means U+0027 and nothing else.

    -- 
    Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
    


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