[mb-style] Unicode objections

[Sami Sundell]

Hello.

> According to some reports, people are complaining that the presence of
> Unicode punctuation characters in MusicBrainz metadata is potentially:

Abarnert summed it up pretty well - the problem rises partly from
expectations; people expect to be able to use regular ASCII for
regular English. And in general, they probably expect to be able to
use characters they can write...

> Suggested solution:

I think the solution is reasonably ok, although I'd definitely like to
see the possibility of cleaning up the typo-punctuation also form the
NGS interface.

The question I'd like to ask, why was there a problem in the first
place? What was the problem that moving into typographically correct
punctuation tries to solve? And how come nobody thought about those
annoying users when the change was made?

Yep, I may come across a bit rough, and I'm not really looking for
"responsible persons" or something like that. I just think that it's
good to recognize that there are actually people who use the data but
aren't interested in following mailing lists. They assume certain
things, and I think working punctuation is one of them. Making a
change to something like that should be carefully thought out and have
some kind of transition plan.

Wieland's suggestion of talking to people is fine, but it requires
there's someone to talk to and who's willing to listen. And even in
that case the steps are in backward order - it should be first made
sure that at least some the most popular players and other software
work correctly with the change, and only then enforce it. Otherwise it
will just alienate people from using MB.

-- 
 Sami Sundell
 ssundell at iki.fi