Re: [TIP] Get rid of the `foo' eyesore

[Jesper Harder]

kai.grossjohann@gmx.net (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:
>
>> Some old broken X fonts do have the "wrong" glyphs in those positions
>> -- that's probably how the habit started.
>
> It is completely unclear to me why the old fonts are considered to be
> broken, rathern than the new ones.  Just because a bunch of people
> now think it's really hip to use other glyphs?

Because ISO-8859-1 (et al.) clearly defines the code point as a grave
accent.  If a font is advertised as ISO-8859-1 but doesn't contain a
grave accent at that position, then it's clearly broken.

> Ascii existed before Unicode, and during that time I'm sure that
> people used `old-style' quoting like this.  So why did Unicode break
> that?

Unicode didn't change it.  Maybe ISO-8859-1 did, but it's not entirely
clear that even all versions of ASCII sanctioned ` as a left
quotation mark, see

       http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/latin1/ascii-hist.html#60