Smart quotes and WTF-8

I’ve had “smart quotes envy” for a long time now. I particularly like them in contractions, and I think they make the text more pleasant to read.

Of course, I’ve been using them on my web pages and blog for some time now, since they are well-supported by browsers. TeX/LaTeX deals with them fine as well, even by just typing ASCII in the source document. Mostly only mail was missing.

I’ve delayed using smart quotes in mail for a long time, since they imply a lot of UTF-8, and there was/is still quite a lot of software and setups not ready for it. But we’re in the 10th year of the 21st century already, and I was getting envious of the increasing number of people that are using them for e-mail.

So I’ve recently switched to smart quotes in my outgoing mail. I realize this goes against the “Be strict in what you emit and liberal in what you accept” principle, which is a fine one, but I must confess aesthetics have won the battle for me in this case.

I’ve already received one complaint from a person using broken software, asking me to send more “comprehensible and correct messages”, and referring to UTF-8 as WTF-8. I wonder how many people to whom my mails are targetted at will have trouble reading them now. I don’t have comments enabled in this blog yet I’m afraid, but feel free to participate in the poll.