Please use standard ASCII quotes, not US-winkle-quotes

Which editor are you using? The quotes appear to copy okay for me with emacs (terminal and X11) and vim.

It is true that double quotes are more of a US English thing, but the alternative is usually single curly quotes rather than double straight quotes.

The pages are not limited to reading with a particular OS or programs. Any non-ASCII character
in text may create a similar problem.

The presented example:

- Windows NT Emacs 21.3 running in -q --no-site-file options

While it doesn't really matter, but to show the most drastic effect:

- The text cannot be pasted at all to Emacs buffer, run in non-windowed mode at Cygwin terminal.

This isn't just a display problem. There may appear complications when winkle-quoted text is copied from
page to editor and later saved to a file. The save may trigger the editor to switch to UTF8 or other character
saving mode. Not a desireable side effect.

The web pages can convey the message using standard single and double quotes as needed, and have full interoperability.

Launchpad uses standard English quotation marks because Launchpad is presented in English. They are not US-centric; on the contrary, using only ASCII symbols *would* be US-centric (the A in ASCII is for American). We may localize Launchpad into other languages in the future, in which case quoted passages would use «…» or „…“ or whatever other (similarly non-ASCII) symbols are appropriate for the given language.

The characters are standard Unicode, so this is a problem with emacs, not with Launchpad. I suggest reporting a bug in the bug tracker for your version of emacs.

The ASCII character set has been used on a wide variety of computers
since the 1960s. There are many applications which still use the ASCII
character sets, or output data using them, and thus problems still
occur. In spite of progress, the world has not switched to Unicode yet.

SUMMARY

- It was demonstrated that using the curved quotes
  (wingle/curved-quotes) cause text copying/editing/saving problems.
- To my knowledge, no computer keyboard has keys for double curved
  quotes discussed here (HTML entities: “ - ” ).
- No benefits from using double curved quotes were mentioned

For further reading. see Markus Kuhn's article "ASCII and Unicode
quotation marks" <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html>
which demonstrates similar interoperability issues.

I would call for reconsideration: is it more important to have certain
typographic glyphs or to have message delivered reliably?

We are happy to fix problems for obscure UAs (see for example bug 39292), so long as that does not make Launchpad look worse for common UAs, which confining ourselves to ASCII would. (We use non-ASCII characters for many things other than quotes.) Nevertheless, we use character entities rather than relying on Unicode encoding, so that the characters show up correctly even in the decade-old Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 4.

The Markus Kuhn article is about why people should not use ` as a left quote, and we do not.