Can you elaborate on why this is mildly infuriating?
Mullenweg says he always manually inputs U+2019 for the apostrophe character because “the apostrophe key on the keyboard is actually the prime mark”. In the video, I search the character up, and it’s the right curly single quote, not the apostrophe. This is as infuriating as people saying “octopi”, except they also have to go to an extra mile just to make this mistake. If you want me to elaborate folder, zoom in on the apostrophe in this reply.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_single_quotation_mark
The Unicode character ’ (U+2019 right single quotation mark) is used for both a typographic apostrophe and a single right (closing) quotation mark.[1] This is due to the many fonts and character sets (such as CP1252) that unified the characters into a single code point, and the difficulty of software distinguishing which character is intended by a user’s typing.[2] There are arguments that the typographic apostrophe should be a different code point, U+02BC modifier letter apostrophe.[3]
In other words, U+2019 is the typographic apostrophe character. It’s also the right single quote character. There are people who think that the typographic apostrophe character should be something else (and having read their arguments, I agree), but in practice, it isn’t, and certainly wasn’t back in the 90s / early 2000s.
He is going to extra lengths just to get it, and even then, it is an apostrophe like how “octopi” is now accepted as a plural form of “octopus”. The straight apostrophe also actually has a unicode name of “apostrophe”, and thus that was its original intention, as opposed to U+2019 being posthumously appropriated.
The unicode standard has stated that U+2019 is the preferred character for apostrophes since at least the late 90s.
And it’s not like using a curved apostrophe in typesetting was novel even then.
as opposed to U+2019 being posthumously appropriated
U+0027 was also an ASCII character. The death of ASCII as a common format is the only one I can think of… what death are you referring to here?
Ah… TIL, thanks.
Everyone talking about how octopi is incorrect and at the time of this writing not a single comment contains the correct plural:
octopodes
Edit:
get out >:(
Surely for such a common character it would be easier to make a new keyboard layout that always types the preferred apostrophe when that key is pressed?
