RFC: Description text in packages

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mardi 16 décembre 2008 à 15:16 -0500, Bill Nottingham a écrit :
> Nicolas Mailhot (nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net) said: 
> > > please just "" or ''
> > > the use of UTF-8 fancy quotations should be done by the renderer
> > 
> > No it should not. This is the road to incompatible software and
> piles of
> > quirks (as in, everyone just has to edit text in Microsoft word
> because
> > input and rendering logic has been implemented there instead of a
> > generic standard encoding level)
> 
> I fail to see how using the neutral quote character ", a perfectly
> valid
> standard unicode character, is the road to incompatible software and
> piles of quirks.

And I didn't object to «"», I object to using accents instead of quote
characters.

> Frankly, I'm surprised you don't sign your mail "Ｎｉｃｏｌａｓ" -
> think of all the extra high bits you could use!

This is just another encoding abuse and it's not better than the ASCII
abuse of grave.

You want to write a latin "A" you use the Unicode latin "A" codepoint
(which is the same as the ASCII codepoint)

You want to write a quote you use a Unicode quote codepoint " or “” or
«» there are several valid solutions in the general punctuation block
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2000.pdf

You want to write a bullet you use the U+2022 bullet codepoint,
something in the dingbat block, or just plain en/em dash.
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2000.pdf
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2700.pdf

You do not use a O (oh) because it is vaguely similar to a 0 (zero)
You do not use an accent because it is vaguely similar to a quote
You do not use a cyrillic a because it looks like a latin a
You do not use a star when what you want is a bullet and there is a
standard way to encode bullets.

You encode your text properly using the correct choices in our standard
encoding so our tools can display it properly without human or computer
second-guessing.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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