For me, that sentence is reason enough.

The irony is that quotes in one of these replies uses the proper tags

and I do mean proper. We’ve been seeing them since we could read.

However, the latter will! So why alienate half your potential audience by failing to adhere to the conventions? Do it wrong and half your audience will be put off to a greater or lesser extent; do it right and nobody will be put off! Simple, really.

And as for the “Language is developing all the time” argument, this is sadly true. So every day I hear people say “He shouldn’t of done it” or, even worse, “I done it right”. Maybe this doesn’t matter to you, but trust me, it really matters to a lot of people, and I don’t want them to think that I’m too ignorant or too lazy to get it right.

So, in short, I disagree with almost everything that you wrote, James!

Meanwhile, there are hacks that will do the job, such as Long Live the Q Tag.

And, yes, I do use &hellip, &mdash, etc, because I read Lynne Truss’ book – Eats Shoots and Leaves

Why would you turn down the chance to make your content more sophisticated?

You make it sound like sophistication is an ends in itself, and something to always aspire to. Surely if we happen to build something that is sophisticated, it’s only a byproduct of what we are trying to achieve?

Likewise, surely if there’s a way of achieving identical outcomes with a simpler solution, we’d take that option?

Deserves? Why the moral component? You can’t expect to ask a bunch of web developers about typography and get an adequate answer. While their job is important, typography is another man’s specialty. It’s about quality. One day we’ll get all the CSS controls we need for it, but we have enough now, like ellipses, to do it right. Machine interoperability? Once again, irrelevant to the discussion.