"Michael Hart" writes:
On Sat, 27 Nov 2004, Andrew Sly wrote:
A while ago, I had the address of a web page which explained in detail why ASCII-96 should not be used as an opening single quote, but I can't find it now.
It's <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html>; basically, the grave and the Latin-1/Unicode acute accent (U+00B4) should be balanced and are in most modern fonts,
In addition, if this really had been intended to be a French accent grave, why is the "_" between it and the " ^ " which could be the French accent cironflex. . .not to mention the lack of an accent aigue, etc. . . .
There's no particular reason for the sorting, but the ' originally leaned right, which not only made `quotes' look right, but make it possible to be used as an acute accent, both designed to be backspaced over the character. If you used the " as diaresis and , as cedilla, you have German and all the Romantic languages handled. The use of backspace in this manner disappeared after ASCII was standardized, making the ASCII collection a little unusual. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm