Crikey! A Verdana's got my baby!

[Karl Smith]

Anyone who has read c.i.w.a.* for more than a few weeks knows that one
of the pet hates of the CIWAHians is Verdana (it's a typeface, BTW).
Future archeologists stumbling across these messages out of context
could be forgiven for thinking "Verdana" must be some kind of
dangerous animal. We must get rid of it, before it gets us!

Oddly, they can never seem to articulate *why* they dislike Verdana,
other than some vague assertion that it looks different. Surely that's
the point. What would be the purpose of all these font files that
infest my computer if all the typefaces looked the same? I can't
understand the apparent level of fear and loathing, just because
something looks a bit different. "A fair go for Verdana," that's all
I'm saying.

If you really find Verdana that distracting, all you need do is remove
the font from your *personal computer* - a simple, painless operation
that will take only a few seconds. Repeatedly asserting to other
people that they should not use something just because the cult
members have chosen to dislike it makes no sense whatsoever.

Is there anyone out there who has actually removed Verdana from their
computer? Perhaps they could explain what the often alluded to, but
rarely explained, "problem" really is?

--
Karl Smith.

[Stan Brown]

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jk******@cs.tu t.fi> wrote in
comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.stylesheets:

Sorry, but the English language has orthography rules, too, and they have
always used asymmetric quotation marks;

Citation, please? "Any English grammar" won't cut it: please cite
the specific passage you are relying on in the specific grammar
book.

I believe I am correct in thinking that English is not your first
language, though you write it quite well. How would you react if I
started making dogmatic statements about Finnish grammar, statements
that you knew to be not only wrong but not even _about_ grammar?

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Tim]

Tim wrote:

If someone wants to be silly enough to use an apostrophe where they
should be using quotes, that's their fault for using the wrong
character.

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla .ac.uk> posted:

Silly enough?

According to the Unicode recommendation, they should be using a
(right) single quote as apostrophe.

If you reckon that using an apostrophe as single quote is "silly
enough", then it'll be interesting to hear what you have to say about
the Unicode recommendation.
I've already discussed that one with Jucca a few days ago. Along the lines
of demonstrating it with something like: This doesn&rsquo;t make any
sense, at all.
Unfortunately, you're making the same kind of mistake as the other
contributors, and assuming that by alluding to "real" characters you
can make it clear to us what you mean. But the Unicode recommendations
say something different. For example that the APOSTROPHE is not
suitable for use as an apostrophe, but only as a compatibility
character - for single quote as well as for apostrophe. And so on.
Consequently, we can't really understand in detail what you're trying
to tell us.
I'm alluding to the idea that when something is "named" as being an
"apostrophe " that it actually is. Both in looks and correct labelling.

The ' character is identified as being an "apostrophe " whether that be
ASCII, ISO-8859-1, or any other character encoding that I've looked at. It
ought to look like one.
e.g. &lsquo;I really don't like single-quoted text,&rsquo; said Tim.
Should actually draw a real apostrophe in the "don't" word, Unicode doesn't have a character REAL APOSTROPHE, and its
recommendation says something which seems to be incompatible with what
you say you want.
Yes, something quite daft. But I take issue between having a real and some
other type of apostrophe. As far as I believe, we have a character
identified as apostrophe, why do we need another. Why don't the fonts just
draw it correctly, instead of emulating some ancient and wrong use:
Everyone just seems to copy the shape of the old 8 by 8 pixel
rendering from ancient terminals, rather than draw an "apostrophe ". At which position in the font?
The "apostrophe " position, the one I've typed several times throughout the
message. :-\ What do you see when I type this ' attempt at an apostrophe
character?
That, to me, is a serious fault in the fonts, rather than the use of
that character.

*Which* character, ferchrissake? The ASCII character (and Unicode
compatibility character) APOSTROPHE is meant to be upright. If you
don't want an upright apostrophe, then don't use the ASCII character.
In what place is it *normal* to design an apostrophe to look like (the
following crude ASCII art):

***
***
***
***

Instead of:

*****
*******
*******
******
***
***
***

None! (That I'm aware of.) Until I heard people making excuses for the
way most fonts draw the damn thing, I've never heard of such as thing as a
"straight-apostrophe".

There's one way to draw an apostrophe, anything else is just a mark on the
page. If anything is going to draw a stylised weird version of an
apostrophe, that ought to be the exception, rather than the norm.
If the font is correctly implementing the Unicode recommendation, then
you're shooting at the wrong target when you claim there's a "serious
fault" in the font. So are you saying there's a "serious fault" in
the Unicode recommendation?

Yes.

--
If you insist on e-mailing me, use the reply-to address (it's real but
temporary). But please reply to the group, like you're supposed to.

This message was sent without a virus, please delete some files yourself.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Stan Brown <th************ @fastmail.fm> wrote:

I have three English grammars on my shelf, as it happens, and _none_
of them specifies the shape of a punctuation mark.
Look again. Do the quotation marks look like " and '? Is the opening
quotation mark identical with the closing quotation mark?
Again I ask, what do you mean by saying " and ' are not correct in
any human language?

There is no human language for which " and ' are correct punctuation
marks. (Contrary to popular belief among typographers, they are not even
correct characters for inch and foot.)

ObCSS: You're in good company. The CSS 2.1 draft still uses the poorly
supported 'quotes' property to create wrong characters in a pointlessly
complicated way:
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/generate.html#quotes-specify
(And it uses a complicated way of generating completely wrong quotation
marks for Norwegian text.)
It surely does not require "high quality typesetting" to produce correct
quotation marks for English. It's elementary, and it's dead simple in
HTML, except for the still relevant issue that there is software that
does not render or process the correct characters correctly. But surely
any browser that can handle the 'quotes' property can produce the correct
characters!

You can decide to use “ and ” and other references, or the
characters themselves in a suitable encoding, in HTML. Or you can decide
that the Web is not yet mature enough for them and stick to surrogates
that are known to be orthographicall y and typographically wrong, yet
widely understood, namely " and '. But messing around with <q> markup and
the 'quotes' property is pointless, and so are attempts to justify the
use of " and ' by claiming them to be correct.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Stan Brown <th************ @fastmail.fm> wrote:

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jk******@cs.tu t.fi> wrote in
comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.stylesheets:

Sorry, but the English language has orthography rules, too, and they
have always used asymmetric quotation marks;
Citation, please?

For what?
"Any English grammar" won't cut it:
It will if you just open a grammar and look at it. It surely contains
rules for presenting quotations.
I believe I am correct in thinking that English is not your first
language,
You are correct, and it's easily checkable from my Web pages.
How would you react if I
started making dogmatic statements about Finnish grammar, statements
that you knew to be not only wrong but not even _about_ grammar?

I would probably ignore them on a forum like this, or send you E-mail to
correct you. If you wrote about quotation marks, then I could easily hit
you on the head (softly, I promise) with a national standard, which I
know quite well. And if you think that punctuation is not part of
grammar, then you just have a little bit narrow view on grammar.
I can understand that - many definitions of "grammar" limit the scope to
things like "classes of words, their inflections, and their functions and
relations in the sentence" - but in reality a grammar for a language that
exists in written form too needs to take a position (either
descriptively or prescriptively) on things like presenting direct
quotations.

(I guess nobody who wants to read on-topic messages only is reading this
thread, so as far as I am concerned, we can keep entertaining ourselves
this way. But this _is_ rather pointless.)

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Tim <ti*@mail.local host.invalid> wrote:

I've already discussed that one with Jucca a few days ago. Along the
lines of demonstrating it with something like: This doesn&rsquo;t
make any sense, at all.
You seem to draw quite some conclusions from the "mnemonic" entity name.
I'm alluding to the idea that when something is "named" as being an
"apostrophe " that it actually is. Both in looks and correct
labelling.
That idea is simply wrong. The names of characters in Unicode largely
reflect various traditions and often relate to particular (and sometimes
outdated) uses of characters. In the absence of any direct information,
we have resort to drawing conclusions from names alone - but here we have
no such absence. The Unicode standard explicitly says that the right
single quotation mark is the preferred character for an apostrophe.
You may disagree with this principle (I do), but it's there, so it surely
trumps any conclusions you have drawn from a name.
The ' character is identified as being an "apostrophe " whether that
be ASCII, ISO-8859-1, or any other character encoding that I've
looked at. It ought to look like one.
Here, too, your conclusions are void and null on the basis of an explicit
statement in the Unicode standard: the character U+0027 has vertical
glyph.

Unicode doesn't have a character REAL APOSTROPHE, and its
recommendation says something which seems to be incompatible with
what you say you want.

Yes, something quite daft.

To be exact, Unicode has a real apostrophe, U+2019, but not as a
character separate from the right single quotation mark.
As far as I believe, we have a
character identified as apostrophe, why do we need another. Why
don't the fonts just draw it correctly, instead of emulating some
ancient and wrong use:
The correct rendering of U+0027 is vertical. The character itself is
ancient, so to say, and ancient shall it look like. One reason to this is
that it has been used as both a left single quotation mark and as a right
single quotation mark, and it was intentionally designed for such usage,
and rendering it as non-neutral would seriously conflict with this.
There's one way to draw an apostrophe,

Typographers would disagree or agree, depending on how they interpret the
statement. There's "one way" to draw the letter "A", in a sense - it must
not look like a "B" - but there is surely a wide range of allowed
variation in glyphs for it. Even more so for "a". The apostrophe is
closer to "A" in this respect. And many typographers think that the
apostrophe can be a slanted short straight line in certain types of
sans serif fonts - which I find odd, but it's reflected in many typeface
designs.

ObCSS: Using the 'quotes' property would not solve this problem the
least. It just adds to the confusion a bit.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Karl Smith]

Responding to this classic piece of double-think:

But the Unicode recommendations say something different.
For example that the APOSTROPHE is not suitable for
use as an apostrophe...
[So why call it APOSTROPHE? Why not call it DEPRECATED ANCIENT
TYPEWRITER APOSTROPHE SUBSTITUTE?]

Tim wrote:

I'm alluding to the idea that when something is "named" as being an
"apostrophe " that it actually is. Both in looks and correct labelling.

The ' character is identified as being an "apostrophe " whether that be
ASCII, ISO-8859-1, or any other character encoding that I've looked at. It
ought to look like one.
[snip]
What do you see when I type this ' attempt at an apostrophe character?
I see a chicken scratch. Something which is *not* a minute of angle
sign, nor a foot sign, nor a prime, certainly nothing like an
apostrophe, nor a "right single quote" (whatever the hell that is),
just an ugly scratch mark. It is not any of the things people
routinely claim it to be.

*Which* character, ferchrissake? The ASCII character (and Unicode
compatibility character) APOSTROPHE is meant to be upright. If you
don't want an upright apostrophe, then don't use the ASCII character.

There is no such thing as an "upright apostrophe". In every case
except one where this (') character appears, it is an error. You can
debate all you want whether it is an author error (it is), an error in
Unicode (it is), an error in fonts, an error in editing software or an
error by keyboard manufacturers (it is), but only an illiterate sees
that character on their screen and does not think, "There is an
error."

The only place the chicken scratch, I mean "upright apostrophe",
character can legitimately appear is in samples of computer source
code.

In what place is it *normal* to design an apostrophe to look like (the
following crude ASCII art):

***
***
***
***

Instead of:

*****
*******
*******
******
***
***
***

None! (That I'm aware of.) Until I heard people making excuses for the
way most fonts draw the damn thing, I've never heard of such as thing as a
"straight-apostrophe".

There's one way to draw an apostrophe, anything else is just a mark on the
page. If anything is going to draw a stylised weird version of an
apostrophe, that ought to be the exception, rather than the norm.

Hear! Hear!

--
Karl Smith.

[Karl Smith]

ji*@jibbering.c om (Jim Ley) wrote:

On Sun, 4 Apr 2004, "Jukka K. Korpela" wrote:

Stan Brown <th************ @fastmail.fm> wrote:

I can't speak for
Finnish, but they are perfectly correct in English, for instance.
No, take any English grammar and you'll see how it described the
quotation marks.

But English Grammar is descriptive, and not proscriptive, and with the
huge body of material which does use " for quotations, you'd be hard
pushed to say it was definitively wrong.

You can drag out the hoary old, "English is a living language,"
rhetoric to apologize for any currently fashionable abuse of the
language that your descendants will cringe at.

ASCII style "quote marks" and "straight apostrophes" should be treated
the same as "the nouning of verbs and the verbing of nouns" ("impact"
anyone?), and misuse of words like "paradigm" and "infrastructure " -
as handy signals that one is reading the the writings of an author who
is only semi-literate.

You could certainly say that many people regard it as so, and that
other symbols are more commonly used, but I don't see how you can
claim it to be wrong.

It may not be wrong by the standards of currently fashionable usage,
but there is a vast gulf between "not wrong" and the dogmatic
description that Stan gave: "Perfectly correct."

It is impossible for anything to be simultaneously in the categories
"abominatio n" and "perfect".

--
Karl Smith.

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Karl Smith wrote:

Responding to this classic piece of double-think:

But the Unicode recommendations say something different.
For example that the APOSTROPHE is not suitable for
use as an apostrophe...
[So why call it APOSTROPHE?
Presumably they felt constrained to the ASCII standard[1], for
compatibility reasons.

[1] In its latest form, that would be ANSI X3.4(1986)

What do you see when I type this ' attempt at an apostrophe character?

In a sense, the answer to that question is irrelevant. What was
actually -posted- was the code of the us-ascii character which the
authoritative specification called "APOSTROPHE ". No matter what weird
and wonderful glyph you choose for populating your local font at that
position, the character itself remains authoritatively the us-ascii
character which was sent. The one which the Unicode specification
rules to be only a compatibility character.

(And don't start me on <font face="Dingbats" >)

*Which* character, ferchrissake? The ASCII character (and Unicode
compatibility character) APOSTROPHE is meant to be upright. If you
don't want an upright apostrophe, then don't use the ASCII character.

There is no such thing as an "upright apostrophe".

Maybe not on your planet, but down here the folks who took the
decisions chose to be constrained by the legacy of the ASCII
specification, and neither you nor I can unilaterally change that.
only an illiterate sees that character on their screen and does not
think, "There is an error."

Well, thank you. I guess that rules me out of membership of the
literacy stakes, then. Should I hand-in my copy of MEU2?

I don't disagree that the situation is unsatisfactory, but I think I
have a more-practical attitude to the finer details. Ho hum.

[Ulujain]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

ji*@jibbering.c om (Jim Ley) wrote:

But English Grammar is descriptive, and not proscriptive, and with the
huge body of material which does use " for quotations, you'd be hard
pushed to say it was definitively wrong.

Sorry, but the English language has orthography rules, too, and they have
always used asymmetric quotation marks; the Ascii apostrophe was never
anything but a typerwriter-age and early computer-era surrogate.

Jukka, the British English way to enclose quotes, i.e spoken dialogue in
books, is a single ' The Grafton/Collins editions of books I own use a
single '.

The American way is using ". The DAW and other US editions of books use
". I've seen very few books enclose quotes in “ and ”

When I have seen them used it's mainly in newspapers and magazines where
they've headlined a quote.

The point I'm trying to make is that English is probably the last
language on Earth to tie down with strict orthographic rules, given its
widespread use, regional differences and the like. It is very much a
mutable thing.

--
Peter aka Ulujain - Computing for Fun!
http://www.ulujain.org/

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Ulujain <pe***@REMOVEul ujain.org> wrote:

Jukka, the British English way to enclose quotes, i.e spoken dialogue
in books, is a single '
I know that British English usually uses single quotation marks (and
double quotation marks for inner quotations), but I also know that it
uses asymmetric (i.e., left and right different) single quotation marks.
The difference in using single and double marks is irrelevant here.
The American way is using ".
No, the American way uses asymmetric double quotation marks.
I've seen very few books enclose quotes in “ and ”

Really? Wait a minute... I check
- The SGML Handbook (which naturally uses Ascii quotation marks in SGML
samples but asymmetric quotation marks in prose)
- Programming Perl (again, Ascii quotes for code samples, but...
- The World' Writing Systems
- The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
- The Extended Phenotype
- The Dark Light Years
and I think I'll stop now - they all use asymmetric quotation marks
(though in one case, I had to look at them twice, since the glyphs were
somewhat strange).

ObCSS: Not surprisingly, Eric Meyer's "Cascading Style Sheets - The
Definitive Guide" uses correct quotation marks too.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/