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

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Edward Cherlin (echerlin at gmail.com):

> I have never seen such an abomination as

That's not my page.  I just grabbed it from a friend's Web site (the
English professor who was, many years ago, my assistant editor for the
San Francisco PC User Group newsletter, from which she excerpted that
humour item, which I wrote), without looking at the markup at all.

But I'll eventually get around to fixing the excruciatingly bad markup
in that, now that you've pointed that out.

> To correctly write English requires something on the order of 500
> characters, not including math symbols.

I really cannot bring myself to care whether I can put the maximally
effete diacritical over the second o in 'cooperation'.  (See point about
prepress, below.  Sorry, I'm not doing prepress at the moment, and
pretending I am fools nobody.)

> It is quite proper to loathe certain sections of Unicode...

I don't loathe it as a general proposition, only as a ridiculously
excessive solution for the problem of western European (and especially
English) charsets.

Arguably, the English language would be less of a train wreck if we
_did_ use the sort of diacritical overload characteristic of, say,
Vietnamese or Finnish, but that boat has sailed, and we simply live with
the possibility of silly jokes about chemists refusing to be unionised.
;->

> U+0022, UTF-8 0x22
> 
> What's the problem?

UTF-8 is.  And that's a bad solution in search of an imaginary problem,
IMO, as I actually prefer vertical double-quotation marks, and really
don't like the curly things except when doing prepress DTP preparation.

(Last time I did prepress, it was in Ventura Publisher for GEM, and we 
used Ventura's tags applied in an ASCII editor to copy submitted in
plaintext.)