John Delacour <JD at Eremita dot demon dot co dot uk> wrote: >> It's a terrible idea. I hate ``this quoting convention" (or >> alternatively ``this one'') as much as anyone. > > It's a very good idea if you consider that it enables us-ascii text > to be easily converted to nicely formatted text containing curly > quotes pointing in the right directions, which is the reason for the > convention.
If it were used only as an intermediate preprocessing step for text to be fed into a text processor, that would be fine. But a great deal of ``this crap'' ends up in the real world, unconverted, where it looks just plain ugly. Plus, as Michael said, it's not that hard to write software that keeps track of matching U+0022's and converts them to U+201C and U+201D as appropriate (and likewise for single quotes). -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
