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The apostrophe produced by ' being straight, it's not appropriate for English text when quotation marks are curved. Meanwhile, HTML5 specifies the use of the straight apostrophe for a technical purpose. While we can use ’ or ’ for English text, they are not either memorable in context or named semantically for the usage. I'd like HTML5 to provide a curved apostrophe with a named character reference that would be semantically relevant. I propose adding &aposc;. I propose no change to the existing ' or to the specifying of the straight apostrophe in HTML5 for a certain programming purpose. Thus, this proposal would add a choice and remove nothing, thus breaking nothing.
I thought I could not enter character entities literally here and display them raw (as ', ’, and ’). I hope the above is clear anyway. Thanks.
Current best practice it to not use named character references at all. At this point they're basically just a legacy feature of the platform. No implementors are interested in adding new ones. Best practice is to type characters directly, without using either named character references or numeric character references. (In reply to Nick Levinson from comment #0) > While we can use > ’ or ’ for English text, they are not either memorable > in context or named semantically for the usage. You can also just type a literal ’ character. That way the problem of what’s memorable or “named semantically” (whatever you mean by that) isn't relevant. > I'd like HTML5 to provide a > curved apostrophe with a named character reference that would be > semantically relevant. I propose adding &aposc;. “aposc” doesn’t seem to be an improvement over “rsquo” in any way. “rsquo“ is a mnemonic for “right single quote” that’s become well-known. “aposc” means nothing to nobody nowhere, and it’s not at all obvious that it’s intended to mean “curved apostrophe”.
That's convenient news and I confirmed it in Firefox, IE, and Chrome. It saves me effort and makes proofreading some files easier. If that hadn't been the case, the rest could have been solved or wasn't that much of a problem. We'd have introduced a term and people who wanted to use it would have learned it, while no one else need have bothered. That would be easier, since calling a curved apostrophe "rsquo" is less meaningful (semantically relevant) than "aposc".