On 2025-08-25 08:45, Robert Elz wrote:
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2025 07:34:25 -0700 From: Paul Eggert via tz <tz@iana.org> | Astrodienst’s Web version of Shanks and Pottenger’s
That's simply wrong, regardless of questions of how nice it is to type, that character that is being misrepresented there by ’ should be an apostrophe ('), which is an entirely different thing than a closing single quote.
There are two issues here. First, whether to use HTML entities like '/‘/’ versus ordinary characters like '/‘/’. Second, whether to use '/' or ’/’ in English possessives and contractions. For the first issue, ordinary characters simplify editing HTML. For the second issue, which is what I think you’re focusing on, there has been considerable confusion and some controversy due to the historical use of ' (U+0027 APOSTROPHE) to mean many things including apostrophe and single quotation marks. On this topic the current Unicode Standard says the following[1]: When text is set, U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred as apostrophe.... U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred where the character is to represent a punctuation mark, as for contractions: “We’ve been here before.” In this latter case, U+2019 is also referred to as a punctuation apostrophe.... The semantics of U+2019 are therefore context dependent. For example, if surrounded by letters or digits on both sides, it behaves as an in-text punctuation character and does not separate words or lines. Given the Unicode’s limitations no approach to this problem is perfect. That being said the Unicode Standard is a reasonable way to go. [1]: https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0/core-spec/chapter-6/#G12411