In a ideal world, yes, this is how it would work. But in practice it is not. The vast, vast majority of documents using non-straight quotes use ’ (U+2019[1], the Windows-1252 \x92 right curly quote that Microsoft Word <3s) for apostrophes. There's not much that can be done about that.
Unicode has to strike a balance between what's most "correct" and how the real world actually uses it.
[1] I was looking at that codepoint and thought it must be wrong. It's too big a number for a Latin-1 codepoint. Aren't the first 256 characters of Unicode just Latin-1? Well, exactly. They're Latin-1, rather than Windows-1252, which is where the now-infamous curly “smart quotes” come from. The two encodings are easily confused, because they're mostly the same. The difference is Microsoft replaced the extra control codes in the high byte (who needs those, really? ASCII had too many already) with more useful new printable characters.
To clarify: I think it'd be better if the Unicode Consortium changed the properties of U+2019 than change which character is the canonical representation of an apostrophe, given you won't be able to change most documents.
If you make apostrophes a different character, how would you make sure apostrophes and end quotes aren't confused? Unless you're a Unicode fanatic, you probably won't manually edit sequences of hexadecimal codepoints.
Comments
In a ideal world, yes, this is how it would work. But in practice it is not. The vast, vast majority of documents using non-straight quotes use ’ (U+2019[1], the Windows-1252 \x92 right curly quote that Microsoft Word <3s) for apostrophes. There's not much that can be done about that.
Unicode has to strike a balance between what's most "correct" and how the real world actually uses it.
[1] I was looking at that codepoint and thought it must be wrong. It's too big a number for a Latin-1 codepoint. Aren't the first 256 characters of Unicode just Latin-1? Well, exactly. They're Latin-1, rather than Windows-1252, which is where the now-infamous curly “smart quotes” come from. The two encodings are easily confused, because they're mostly the same. The difference is Microsoft replaced the extra control codes in the high byte (who needs those, really? ASCII had too many already) with more useful new printable characters.
"Unicode has to strike a balance between what's most 'correct' and how the real world actually uses it."
That train left Unicode station a very long time ago. They have chosen correctness over convenience too many times to switch tactics now.
To clarify: I think it'd be better if the Unicode Consortium changed the properties of U+2019 than change which character is the canonical representation of an apostrophe, given you won't be able to change most documents.
If you make apostrophes a different character, how would you make sure apostrophes and end quotes aren't confused? Unless you're a Unicode fanatic, you probably won't manually edit sequences of hexadecimal codepoints.