On 2025-08-26 13:45, Paul Eggert wrote:
So it looks like we should avoid <q>.
After reviewing the comments on this topic it seems that plain UTF-8 is the way to go. I went through the HTML and public-facing files like README (visible on GitHub), and used UTF-8 quotes and a few other special characters to make the files easier to edit and/or read. The complete set of non-ASCII characters that now occur directly in *.html, *.txt, or other public-facing text files is now: §«°±»½¾×–‘’“”•→−≤★⯪ and this set is now documented and checked in Makefile as UNUSUAL_OK_CHARSET. Although we can extend this character set as needed, I thought it better to not allow arbitrary UTF-8 due to the usual problems with normalization, confusables, etc. I installed the attached set of proposed patches to implement this. The first patch is mostly a mistake but that is rectified in the last patch. I considered going further, by using curved quotes and other special characters in commentary in the main (non public facing) data files, e.g., to say “34° 54′ S” instead of the current “34° 54' S” so that comments use U+2032 PRIME instead of the approximation U+0027 APOSTROPHE to denote minutes. However, this would be more work and I was not sure it would be worth the maintenance hassle long term so I left it alone for now. The only change these patches make to data (as opposed to commentary) consists of changing Côte d'Ivoire to Côte d’Ivoire in iso3166.tab. The patches also change Gur'yev to Gur’yev and Dumont d'Urville to Dumont d’Urville in the comments column of zone1970.tab, and remove some unnecessary "s in the comments column of zonenow.tab.