> > I know that many people, and even very competent ones, are throwing of
> > confusion in this field, trying to "repair" ASCII.  This is unfortunate.

> At first, this was what I thought, too.  Then I read Markus Kuhn's
> article on this subject and I fear he's right:

>     http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html

> ;)

Yes.  I was silently referring to Markus, above.  Markus is usually very
right, and quite dynamic as a guy, but I'm not following him on this one,
even if I was much tempted to.  I had to calm down and think a bit more,
before deciding that his proposal is a confusing compromise, however serious
it may look like.  In fact, Markus invited me to look at the Unicode
reference, and this is what really convinced me that Unicode is really
made to compatible with ASCII, including the ambiguous usage of the quote.

I might be wrong, of course.  That would not have been the first time,
nor the last.  Yet, I still honestly think that the problem has been
invented by font makers and later users, but is away from both Unicode and
ASCII standards.  Many active people are busy at producing complex software
solutions around a problem which should rather be corrected by font makers,
which did propagate the problem by imposing debatable, non-standard views.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard