> Desktop world seems not to care about such details
My free, open-source, desktop text editor, KeenWrite, integrates my quote curling typographic library, KeenQuotes. KeenQuotes curls straight single quotes, double quotes, swaps in the multiplication symbol, corrects low opening double quotes (,,), and handles numeric primes, all while respecting code blocks. KeenWrite replaces some ligatures, but proper ligatures need to account for etymology, which has no simple solution. (Aside, even curling straight quotation marks properly requires part-of-speech processing.)
KeenWrite[1] exports to text, XHTML, or PDF files. Architecturally, the XHTML format doubles as an XML format that is passed to ConTeXt[2] for typesetting into PDF. ConTeXt developers care deeply about typography.