What has happened to Apostrophes?

Question

Why do websites, news articles, blogs, etc. have trouble these days with apostrophes? Instead of the little ' mark, there is usually a set of letters and numbers where the apostrophe is supposed to go. Any reason why no one is fixing this?

Answer 1

Apostrophes are considered special characters and are handled differently by different clients. To be read correctly in a url for example, the apostrophe must be urlescaped into an entity which is what you are seeing.

The creator of the webpage needs to transform that entity back into an ascii character and they haven't done it in these cases. I don't know why. There are issues regarding the code that we are unaware of, however we should never see these entities.

One issue regarding special characters, or suspect characters of any kind is that the server that is rendering these characters may identify them as potentially malicious or the database may fail when trying to store them  (like semicolons).

From end-to-end, the issue of rendering and transforming standard and non-standard ascii characters is one all developers must face when creating software.

These entities you are seeing is the result of data being sent from one interface to another over the http protocol.

Someone on the visual end of things either forgot, refused, or can't convert this entity back to a character people can read.

Here is an example...

I am going to write the entity for an apostrophe like this

"& a p o s ;" but without spaces. Note how it renders

'

without spaces. ^ it's an apostrophe.

If the interface (in this case an html-capable text box) understands these entities, it will show as an apostrophe. if not, it will show as  "&a p o s;"