- From: Russell Steven Shawn O'Connor <roconnor@wronski.math.uwaterloo.ca>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jul 1997 15:02:42 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-html@w3.org
Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
> At 1:25a +0200 07/27/97, Holger Wahlen wrote:
> > Seeing that there are entity definitions for things like en
> > dash, left double quotation marks and the likes coming up,
> > I'm wondering why I can't find anything to represent an
> > apostrophe [1]. Okay, there's "’", but wouldn't it be
> > better to have a name like "&apo;" as well? Imagine this:
> > <!ENTITY rsquo CDATA "’">
> > <!ENTITY apo CDATA "’">
> > After all, the same glyph [2] is used in two different
> > functions, so wouldn't it be appropriate to have two
> > possibilities to refer to it? Apart from the mnemonic
>
> Technically, that is not an apostrophe. ' is, regardless
> of whether it looks "curly" or not. One could easily argue that
> using a right single quote as an apostrophe constitutes abuse...
Actually ' has multiple meanings, single closing quote, apostrophe,
part of a double closing quote, an acute accent, prime, feet, ...
What should be added is
<!ENTITY apo CDATA "ʼ">
Character number 700 is unabiguously an apostrophe. (I think that is the
correct character number)
Yes, using ’ as a apostrophe would be abuse.
[snip]
> And your use of "`" is correct? To me (and Adobe), that is a
> grave accent which you are [mis]using as a left single quote.
> That makes me shudder like fingernails on a chalkboard do. Ick.
Character number 96 (`) also has multiple meanings. A single open quote,
part of a double opening quote, a grave accent, backwards prime, ...
Again Unicode has peticular characters, which may or may not look
indentical, for all of these possible meanings.
> > [2] Actually I'm not quite certain whether it really is the
> > same: Does Unicode distinguish between `real' apostrophe and
>
> Ack, he did it again... a grave accent diacritic.
His use is approprate. (see above)
Someday I'm goign to look up the original meaning(s) for ` and ' in the
ANSI X3.4 standard. For now I have been relying on the meaning given in
the UNICODE 2.0 book.
(Note: this character ` doesn't look much like a grave accent on my VT240
terminal)
--
Russell O'Connor roconnor@uwaterloo.ca
<URL:http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/%7Eroconnor/>
"And truth irreversibly destroys the meaning of its own message"
-- Anindita Dutta, "The Paradox of Truth, the Truth of Entropy"
Received on Wednesday, 30 July 1997 15:02:44 UTC