What’s up with ARM

The url is not working--this one does: http://preview.tinyurl.com/6kquxos http://tinyurl.com/6kquxos

There is an apostrophe in the URL, which is probably goofing it up.

linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/

2011/05/what's-arm

Worse, that apostrophe is in Unicode, apparently:



I've wasted enough time 'hexing' apostrophes to { 27h | $27 | 0x27 | your-immediate-constant-format-here } in assembly code to get around specific assemblers and their notions of quoting message strings. Now we have a much more stylish and ornate version to worry about.

Why, WHY, WHY! do these sites insist on using "smart" apostrophes in URLs. I'm not sure why they're using them in headlines either, BECAUSE THIS IS THE WEB, WHERE SMART QUOTES AREN'T NECESSARY.

Coming from too many years of print journalism, I've finally gotten the "smart quotes" beaten out of me, only to have a Linux web site not only insist on using them in articles, but also using them in URLs ...

I know this is the result of some misguided CMS that is taking the headline and building the URL out of it, but if Movable Type can deal with this kind of thing, whatever CMS the Linux Foundation is using can do the same.

Time for all of us to write them an e-mail gently telling them that they'd be forgiven if they were the Heart Disease Foundation. But as the Linux Foundation, not so much.

Quoting:BECAUSE THIS IS THE WEB, WHERE SMART QUOTES AREN'T NECESSARY

Well, if you're coming from the print world, you're going to be sick without them. "No, no, NO! It's not a minus, it's an EM-DASH!!!!". In that world they're not "stylish"; they're the only thing that IS ;)

Like I said before: LXer sadly doesn't handle # and ' and " very well, I still have to "ping" Bob about this.

So for now we use the bit.ly hack, as tinyurl doesn't work (forme) either.

Quoting: Like I said before: LXer sadly doesn't handle # and ' and " very well, I still have to "ping" Bob about this.

Might as well. As internationalization of hostnames catches on, this kind of problem will spread to the FQDN part of the URI as well. I don't think we're in ASCII anymore, Toto.

Quoting:BECAUSE THIS IS THE WEB, WHERE SMART QUOTES AREN'T NECESSARY.

Whoever told you that is a lazy programmer who couldn't be arsed to fix his code. It's *wrong*. Better punctuation and typography makes you better at communicating and easier understandable. Just as grammar and spelling does. There's a reason us bearded UNIX geeks hate SMS language "if u know wht i mean, like any1!"

The problem is in the software, where the code that generates the slug from the article title fails to properly strip the punctuation.