Apostrophe (was Re: Names)

Cary Karp ck at nic.museum
Tue Mar 24 02:15:31 CET 2009


 > Look back at the email archives; this character is used
 > in many languages, in many surnames.

Swedish keyboards have separate keys for the U+0027 APOSTROPHE and the 
U+00B4 ACUTE ACCENT. Many users do not distinguish between the two marks 
and regularly hit the U+00B4 key when typing either. There is no 
realistic expectation that  o’connor.tld would be entered correctly on 
the first attempt, and although a clever user might retry using the 
other alternative on their keyboard, when that also failed, I doubt that 
anyone would puzzle out the reason for the repeated error to be failure 
to recognize the U+2019.

Unless the Swedish keyboard and its users are apostrophically challenged 
to an unusual degree, whose interests are being served by protocol 
support for this sort of confusion?

/Cary



More information about the Idna-update mailing list