On Thu, January 26, 2012 11:17 am, Paul Flo Williams wrote:
I'm not sure I see the value in marking up apostrophe as ' if you're a fan of curly quotes. You'd still have to go through and replace them with right single quotation marks somewhere in your workflow, as ' is the vertical single quote at U+0027.
' is not necessarily ASCII 27, that's simply the default XML mapping. If you're going to hack the DTD like I was talking about, ' can be anything you want it to be. It is true that if you stick with the default mappings ' can be a little jarring because all the quote marks will be curled but the apostrophes will be straight. However, I do see some value in maintaining a distinction between the right single quote and the apostrophe. This is, indeed, a thorny issue if you want to create a system where the user gets to choose between curly and straight punctuation. One solution is that which I proposed, which is to use ' and rely on entity definitions to "make it look good." Another might be to use ’ for quotation marks and ’ (U+2019) for apostrophes (in this case, swapping quotation styles would not affect apostrophes, but you couldn't "uncurl" the apostrophes if you wanted). Of course, the notion of swapping quotation styles really is a far edge case, so the best choice may be to not use ' at all and just tell people "if you swap quotation styles you will probably end up with a mess, so be prepared." I would still like to be able to maintain the apostrophe/quote distinction, but I'm old enough to know that I don't always get what I want. The main point of my response to the Bower Bird was that it could be done, not that it should.