Please remove the ' reference

I stumbled across the following error message from the W3C CSS 
Validator:

Property -moz-border-radius doesn't exist : 0.4em

I have no objection to the message as such, but I do have an objection 
to using the entity reference ' in the generated message.

In particular, Internet Explorer displays it literally. The reason is 
that although the validator's report is in XHTML format, is is served as 
text/html, so IE treats it by "old" HTML rules, so ' is undefined.

I'm afraid this could be fairlt confusing to people who don't know the 
sad ' story.

Moreover, there is _no_ reason to use '.

If you want to use the ASCII apostrophe (which is what ' is 
supposed to mean), use it as such. The generating software may need some 
"escape" mechanism, but that's commonplace programming. Alternatively, 
use ', which means the same and works universally.

Finally, if you wish to use the correct punctuation mark, the apostrophe 
as per English rules, use ’. (Actually, the report appears to be 
UTF-8 encoded, you could use the right single quotation mark as such. 
Anyway, it is the preferred character for a punctuation apostrophe, by 
the Unicode Standard.)

Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 9 April 2008 11:34:54 UTC