49019 - UI strings ought to use smart quotes (typographic quotation marks)

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, enhancement)

Description

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen) (on vacation)]

Build ID: 2000081320

Example steps to reproduce:
1) Open a new page in Editor
2) Type a character
3) Close the window

Actual results:
A "Do you wnat to save?" dialog appears. The delimiters (\u0022) used around the 
document title look like inch signs. The apostrophe (\u0027) in the "Don't save" button 
looks like a foot sign.

Expected results:
Expected the UI to use smart quotes like in other apps. Expected (in the en-US version) 
the left double quote (\u201C) and the right double quote (\201D) to be used as 
document title delimeters and
\u2019 to be used as the apostrophe. (Or is there another code point for this purpose that 
maps to the same glyph?)

Additional information:
This is probably not the only place in the UI where this problem appears. Fixing this is 
likely to require searching through the string bundles.

Comment 1

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen) (on vacation)]

Assigning to self for further investigation.

Comment 2

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen) (on vacation)]

Really assigning to self...

Comment 3

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen) (on vacation)]

Attachment: Patch for en_US .properties files

Comment 4

[J Luh]

I'm pretty sure \u2019 is the right character to use for the apostrophe

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Henri - are you going to chase review for this? It's a can of worms to open 
because we have to be consistent throughout the UI...

Gerv

Comment 6

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen) (on vacation)]

I fixed this partially, but then I ran into trouble. For some reason the Unicode qoutes worked in some places 
but didn't work in others. The patch was partial and is probably rotten by now. I don't have the time to take 
another look right now.



Sorry for keeping the bug without actually fixing it. Reassigning to the component owner.

Comment 7

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

If a newer, more up to date patch comes along, throw it into a more recent 
target milestone. I'm not likely to get to doing all this myself, so for now 
P5/Future. 

Comment 8

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

> I'm pretty sure \u2019 is the right character to use for the apostrophe

That is correct. See also
<URL: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html >.

Comment 9

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

This bug is targeted at a Mac classic platform/OS, which is no longer supported
by mozilla.org. Please re-target it to another platform/OS if this bug applies
there as well or resolve this bug.

I will resolve this bug as WONTFIX in four weeks if no action has been taken.
To filter this and similar messages out, please filter for "mac_cla_reorg".

Comment 10

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 11

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 12

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 13

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 14

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 15

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 16

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 17

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but still has no comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project 5 years ago.

Because of this, we're resolving the bug as EXPIRED.

If you still can reproduce the bug on SeaMonkey 2 or otherwise think it's still valid, please REOPEN it and if it is a platform or toolkit issue, move it to the according component.

Query tag for this change: EXPIRED-20100420

Comment 18

[Karsten Düsterloh]

Still valid and wanted!

Comment 19

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

This bug has far-reaching l10n implications and includes two, shall I say, "sections", maybe (or maybe not) worthy of separate bugs

- Apostrophes (U+2019 instead of U+0027). Some languages make extensive use of apostrophes (e.g. English for the genitive and optionally for don't = do not, isn't = is not, it's = it is, etc.; French for the article; Italian for the article including when contracted; etc.), others less (Dutch the plurals of many words ending in an open vowel, and, maybe of less import, in some place names like 's-Hertogenbosch, 's-Gravenbrakel, etc., and optionally in 't Is = Het is, 't Gaat = Het gaat, etc., probably not found in Mozilla code), others hardly any.

- Quotation marks. All languages use them, and they aren't the same: if we limit ourselves to top-level quotes, I know (or think I do) of “English” (U+201C opening, U+201D closing), « French » (with no-break spaces: U+00AB U+00A0 opening, U+00A0 U+00BB closing), „German“ (U+201E opening, U+201C closing), “Russian„ (opposite of German), and I don't even know what kinds of quotes are used by the various RTL, South-Asian and East-Asian scripts and languages, to mention just a few.

Notwithstanding the bug's "Summary", the above comments are actually about apostrophes, not quotation marks; but the latter should also be checked for consistency, eliminating the occurrences of U+0022 or U+0027 when used as a quotation mark (and, 'this' may become ‘this’ or “this” with complementary quotes, but not ’this’ with two identical apostrophes).

Comment 20

[Alexander L. Slovesnik]

(In reply to Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec] from comment #19)
> - Quotation marks. All languages use them, and they aren't the same: if we
> limit ourselves to top-level quotes, I know (or think I do) of “English”
> (U+201C opening, U+201D closing), « French » (with no-break spaces: U+00AB
> U+00A0 opening, U+00A0 U+00BB closing), „German“ (U+201E opening, U+201C
> closing), “Russian„ (opposite of German), and I don't even know what kinds
> of quotes are used by the various RTL, South-Asian and East-Asian scripts
> and languages, to mention just a few.
FWIW, Russian language doesn't use “„ quotes. Russian language uses French quotes as primary quotes and German quotes as inner quotation marks.
There is nice table in Wikipedia - http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anf%C3%BChrungszeichen#Andere_Sprachen - that list which kinds of quotes are used in different languages.

Comment 21

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

Ian - This is an old one, but are you still willing to mentor it?

Comment 22

[Rainer Bielefeld]

After 15 years this one does not look like an easy hack good first bug for beginners