[conspire] I renounce the devil Unicode and all of its works

[Rick Moen]

(Tongue lodged in teeth?  Not telling.)


To: Bhikkhu Pesala <pesala at aimwell.org>
Cc: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr at thyrsus.com>
Subject: Re: Wrongly encoded Web Page
In-Reply-To: <op.vvpriabrq5zcno at aimwell-org.cable.virginmedia.net>
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.
X-Mas: Bah humbug.

Quoting Bhikkhu Pesala (pesala at aimwell.org):

> Your web page at
> http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#writewell is wrongly
> encoded so smart quotes display as code, e.g.
>
> â?~B??~SGood question!â?~B?�

Awfully good point.  Thank you, Bhikkhu.

Eric:

I personally am a Norwegian-American reactionary about charsets when
writing in the English language, preferring literal ISO 8859-1
(Latin-1) or (more precisely) its close cousin ISO 8859-15 (informally,
Latin-9 AKA Western European), which replaces eight symbols with
more-useful ones, notably the Euro symbol.  UTF-8 is the Wave of the
Future and Gateway to Unicode<tm>, which IMVAO is reason enough to
loathe it and all its overengineered baggage.  But you should of course
make up your own mind.

(I won't hate you even if you start stumping for Java.  ;->  )

So, me, I'd fix the problem by using the vertical ", which
Latin-1/Latin-9 carry over from primordial US-ASCII (still in charset
position 34 decimal), or by using its HTML-entity equivalent " .

By contrast, if the curly things are deemed obligatory, in contrast to
ASCII-like vertical double-quotation marks, then Latin-1/Latin-9 cannot
suffice, whereas UTF-8 does.