Subject: Re: [lojban] Attitudinals

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 18:58:39 EDT

In a message dated 6/13/2001 4:32:17 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Most Microsoft applications have an option to turn off "smart quotes". 
> Using such advantages in a Microsoft Word document is perfectly acceptable,
> as such a document is already limited to the audience of those who
> use such products. However if you want to present professional looking
> documents in HTML it seems reasonable to abide by the standards created for
> such documents. If you want more control over presentation than is allowed
> by standard HTML, perhaps you should consider publishing in PDF.
> 

This is an old and tired argument, but, since most people use Microsoft 
everything, shouldn't people who want to have users meet their standards 
rather than asking the vast majority to conform to the miniscule minorities 
inferior "standards"? Why, for example, doesn't HTML have "smart quotes"? 
And one character tabs and umlauts and all the rest of the useful critters an 
ordinary word processor provides? In fact it does have most of them if 
you're willing to type a half-dozen characters to get them; why not just one 
or two? I'm sure there are non-cultic reasons for these choices. My only 
point is that insulting 90% of potential users is probably not good PR, nor 
is imposing not obviously motivated restrictions on them.