Entirely unrelated, but this headline made me notice that Chrome finally supports entering " in the find-in-page box and having it match so-called smart quotes.
Also nobody magically switches my parentheses around out from under me.
And, yes, autocorrect can be a PITA, especially when it's not actually getting things correct, but that's a different, albeit related, issue. We should really refer to quote marks, or apostrophe (which are often rendered as curly, and are the characters that autocorrect switches to), and the prime symbol (which is the unadulterated character that you get with the non-meta-pressed key on your keyboard), rather than using the term 'smart quotes'.
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ASCII 1967, in conjunction with its European counterpart ECMA-6, permitted the visual appearance of some characters, including the apostrophe, to be modified so that they could be used as accents when overstruck¹:
' " , ^ ` ~
ˊ ¨ ¸ ˆ ˋ ˉ (using the modern Unicode spacing modifiers)
In the 7-bit character set, some printing symbol may be
designed to permit their use for the composition of ac-
cented letters when necessary for general interchange of
information. A sequence of three characters, comprising
a letter, BACKSPACE and one of these symbols, is needed
for this composition; the symbol is then regarded as a dia-
critical sign. It should be noted that these symbols take
on their diacritical significance only when they precede or
follow the character BACKSPACE; for example, the symbol
corresponding to the code combination 2/7 normally has the
significance of APOSTROPHE, but becomes the diacritical
sign ACUTE ACCENT when preceded or followed by the character
BACKSPACE.²
¹Revised American Standard Code for Information Interchange, from http://www.wps.com/J/codes/Revised-ASCII/index.html
²ECMA-6: 7-Bit coded Character Set, 4th Edition, August 1973, from http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...
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2307 ⌇ WAVY LINE http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2300.pdf
301C 〜 WAVE DASH http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3000.pdf
Smart quote are a bit of a pain, but they do look nice. Really I prefer em dash, en dash, ellipses; I regret that OS doesn't have a keyboard entry for bullet. (Then, Linux doesn't either, other than entering in the code point directly with Ctrl+Shift+U or whatever it is.)
You can also edit your keyboard layout to make certain characters possible or easier to type, using Ukelele (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=...) for OS X.
I created a custom layout using Ukelele that makes typing smart quotes easier. With it, opening ‘ and closing ’ single smart quotes are <option>+[ and <option>+] instead of <option>+{ and <option>+<shift>+{, and double smart quotes “ ” are similarly more intuitive to type. I use it all the time. You can try it out yourself by downloading it from http://a.pomf.se/bipwcr.zip and moving the two files into “~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/”.
"9001 Wrong Things Programmers Assume About Internationalization"
This behavior should at a minimum be locale-aware. I would be surprised if Firefox did that by default in my pt-BR profile.
Is that loose of a search not actually desirable in "find in page" instances?
In other words, are there many words where 'e' matching 'é' would actually generate a false positive? This is the only case I could see that would be problematic.
And even then "find in page" is usually used as quick navigation to the minimum matching search (high recall) and not about excluding all possible mismatches (high precision).
It's even worse than that. 'e' is the most used letter in french, but 'é' and 'è' are quite used too. 'ê' and 'ë' being rarer, but still existing.
So, I am exaggerating it a bit, but you can compare it to having to search for words with the consonants, because every vowel is considered the same by your search algorithm.
Yes, I'm pushing it, but you see the problem it can easily become in huge pages.
Most pages nowadays are small enough that it won't be a bother, but their still are some cases (newspaper posts, blog analysis, etc...) where accent sensitiveness will be an issue.
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