You Choose ’08
Friday, December 7th, 2007
YouTube has a great service called You Choose ‘08 where you can watch video on each candidate speaking about all of the major issues.
This is incredible, one of the most useful tools I’ve found on the net for comparing what these folks have said and are saying.
Richard, I do not know what software’s smart quotes tricked you, but I believe the curly quote on “08″ should be an apostrophe and thus curl in the other direction. In these kind of cases, automatic smart quotes are usually too dumb to trust.
david.
David, right, good eyes, let me see about the ascii code for that one:
& r s q o ;
He he, while we are at it, “& r s q o ;” is not an ascii code, it is an HTML entity. In basic ascii there is only character 39, which is the apostrophe and does not look near as good as the right single quote. Look here for some more fun: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/reference/characters/
Cheers,
david.
p.s., the reason I noticed is not because of my good eyes, but because I became sensitive to it, as I see this error more an more in print, newspapers, magazines, billboards, etc. I think the smart quotes feature in Microsoft Word first created this error and now, as more software has smart quotes the problem becomes so widespread that art directors, copywriters and so forth don’t even see the error anymore when the software makes it. Or perhaps they no longer even realize it is an error.