Subject: Re: [lojban] Attitudinals

From: Robin Lee Powell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 16:08:09 -0700

On Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 06:58:39PM -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
> 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"? 

Oh jesus fuck.

Because they're not quotes!!

The quotes is ". ASCII 34. Smart quotes are neither smart (they do
amazingly strange things if you have more than 2 of them in a sentence)
nor quotes (they're ASCII 0240 or something like that).

> And one character tabs 

Look! ^ A one character tab! What the hell are you talking about?

> and umlauts 

It does.

> and all the rest of the useful critters an ordinary word processor
> provides? 

Because you're not talking about an ordinary word processor, you're
talking about proprietary bullshit.

> In fact it does have most of them if you're willing to type a
> half-dozen characters to get them; 

But not smart quotes, thank goth.

> why not just one or two? 

Are you clear on the concept of 7-bit ASCII? If not, I suggest you
remove yourself from this argument.

-Robin, who's been on the 'net since Gopher was king and is sick of you
whiny M$ lusers. He's also in a bad mood.

-- 
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ BTW, I'm male, honest.
le datni cu djica le nu zifre .iku'i .oi le so'e datni cu to'e te pilno
je xlali -- RLP http://www.lojban.org/