After looking at today’s little change[1] to one of TZDB’s HTML files, I noticed that it cited Morrison et al’s 2020 paper but changed the paper’s title to use straight quotes 'like this' instead of curved quotes ‘like this’. Although TZDB’s HTML files mostly use straight quotes, they’re not methodical about it, and anyway straight quotes are to some extent a relic of the 20th century and in HTML files we can now reliably use curved quotes. So I composed a patch (attached) to be more consistent about quoting, and to use curved quotes except in places where the quotes are part of computer code and need to be straight. I haven’t installed this patch, though, because it’s annoying to edit HTML that looks like this: strings like “Prague”, “Praha”, “Прага”, and “布拉格”. I’d rather edit HTML that looks like this: strings like “Prague”, “Praha”, “Прага”, and “布拉格”. Since the HTML files are already UTF-8 encoded (otherwise they wouldn’t contain those non-ASCII letters) this shouldn’t be a problem with today’s editors. In 2014[2] I held off on making such a change because Garrett Wollman wrote that XEmacs 21.4 does not support quotes ‘like this’ or “like this”. However, XEmacs 21.4 has not been updated since 2009 and by now I would think XEmacs users would be using either XEmacs 21.5 (even though it’s still “beta”) or GNU Emacs, and both of these do support curved quotes. So instead of installing this patch, I’m inclined to install a different one in which HTML files use UTF-8 quotes “like this” rather than harder-to-read HTML entities “like this”. If this is OK we can also do something similar with other special characters such as “–” instead of “–”. Comments welcome. I am ccing this email to Garrett to see whether XEmacs 21.4 is still an issue with him. [1]: https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/message/BH63ZL5DHEBJPT2CC... [2]: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2014-June/046053.html