Re: [Emacs-diffs] master b533552 2/5: Documentation fixes re quotes

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 09/03/2015 08:42 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:

> They’re both.  They’re markup that typically stand for themselves when

You can just as well call the letters of the alphabet "markup that 
stands for itself". Or, less contrivedly, programming language keywords 
or words with typos (which flyspell will highlight).

> generating text, and that’s a win over markup that doesn’t do that.

Not at all. It's more error prone:

If the programmer types `foo`, they can look at the output and see that 
the quotes were not recognized as a matching pair (don't render as 
expected).

If the programmer types ‘foo‘, they can easily miss the non-matching 
quotes if they expect the output to look the same as input. Everyone who 
configured Emacs to render quotes differently will bear the pain of that 
mistake, but not the author.

> It’s like Markdown’s syntax for URLs: you just type http://example.com
> and it just works.  (Emacs docstrings would do well to support that idea
> too, but I’m digressing....)

It's no syntax, just auto-linkification in the renderer. And it's 
notoriously error-prone; the types of URLs that get broken during 
auto-linkification change from program to program.