Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2006 23:23:57 -0500
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>,
WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Eats, Shoots & Leaves....
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
At 1/14/2006 05:51 PM, Keith F. Lynch wrote:
>I recently ran into a website that said, "Because of formatting
>problems, quotation marks will appear as stars." At least people
>are starting to recognize that there's a problem.
In e-mail it's a frequent issue. I first started seeing it from Mac
users. They'd use different characters for open and close single quote
marks...which may be correct in publishing, but not in the computer world
(where most people who wrote e-mail back then lived). In many computer
languages 'this is a string'...but `this is not'.
On a web page I wouldn't expect there to be a problem. The HTTP can
specify the character set in use, and the web page can specify the quotes
with " anyway, so the browser will use whatever the local character
set offers for that. I suspect that the author of that site was just
using single characters rather than the " mechanism, and when the
viewer's system didn't have the right character set on it, weirdness set in.
-- Mike B.
--
--==> A Non-Compost Mentis Production <==--