"What's it to you?"

[A. Vine]

Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>
> WHAT'S IT TO YOU?
>
>     The Making of America database works in some strange ways.  It will NOT
> recognize "What's it to you?"  It WILL recognize "What s it to you?"
> Couldn't they work out this kink??

I'll hazard a guess.  Depending on how the text gets into the system, the mark
for the apostrophe is not always the same character (codepoint).  In some
cirumstances, this manifests itself as as question mark.  For example, people
create Web pages using Microsoft products, which use proprietary characters.
"What's" will look like "What?s" on a non-Microsoft machine.

It might be that the database search engine has trouble with the various
characters for apostrophe.  Or, the apostrophe could be a special character that
the program processing your input has not accounted for.

Andrea
--
Andrea Vine
Sun-Netscape Alliance messaging i18n architect
avine at eng.sun.com
I always wanted to be an architect. }sigh{  Of course, I _am_ an architect.