Forum OpenACS Improvement Proposals (TIPs): Re: Tip#93: Add optional support to automatically remove smart quotes from textareas

In general we should move towards storing user input as Unicode in the database and then depend on the display logic to take care of presenting pages with browser/html friendly text as needed (which should be the default).

E.g. this ASCII Demoroniser, which "corrects moronic Microsoft HTML": http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/

has a Unicode variant:
http://rheme.net/unmoroniser/

If we set this up correctly, we can then easily create things like valid xml feeds for content without worrying about what users type in text fields (presently I get feed validation errors for any non-typical input: e.g. special characters in German or Icelandic) and worry less about any xhtml validation errors caused by users as the cleanliness of the toolkit's markup increases with time.