[rescue] UTF-8 [was what can you do with an Apple Quadro 840AV]

[Nathan Raymond]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 12:00 PM, John Floren <john at jfloren.net> wrote:

> (personally I find Apple's insistence of changing regular quotes to
> typographic quotes pretty stupid, but not as stupid as GMail's
> continued attempts to switch over to HTML mode whenever it thinks it
> can get away with it, grr)
>

I agree, if by "insistence" you mean a default setting that I question
whether it should be default (System Preferences > Keyboard > Text > "Use
smart quotes dashes" in OS X/macOS, Settings > General > Keyboard > "Smart
Punctuation" in iOS). I have no issue that the feature/setting was created,
but why make it default and with zero fanfare to the change? The problem it
solves (making it somewhat easier to determine whether quoted text is
starting or ending by having quote marks tilted or flipped as distinct
openers and closers vs. agnostic quote marks) seems to not be worth the
trade-off of introducing high-ASCII/UTF-8 requirement where formally there
was none (and all the downsides of needing to support/respect non-7bit
ASCII for communication). And I'm personally perturbed by having to
cross-check any scripts or code posted to the internet for inadvertent
smart quotes (which of course does not parse in any dev environment I am
aware of). That sort of code corruption is very aggravating to me.

- Nate