Well, not to belabor the point too much I'll simply put it that I don't 
like "curly" quotes and friends and find them to be of dubious value.  
In my experience they produce an unending stream of headaches and 
compatibility issues, your insistence that they "shouldn't" 
notwithstanding.

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/windows-chars.html explains things 
better than I could.

Apart from which I can't be bothered to remember what 6 keys I have to 
hold down together to make them.  So I'm happier with them out of my 
life.  But that's my personal problem I guess.

I do agree that at least part of the problem is lack of encoding 
identification.

> A move to Latin-1 is at least a move to the bottom chunk of Unicode.

Yes, this is a step in the right direction.

> My concern was simply to point out that something WILL be lost by the
> move, and that we don't actually need to lose quite that much.

But adopting the windows extensions just gets us a new proprietary 
encoding,
not closer to unicode.  I'd rather stay with what we have then.

> It is difficult to support UTF-8 _anywhere_ correctly without 
> supporting
> 21-bit characters practically _everywhere_ except for display.

Could you explain this?  UTF-8 is just variable byte length encoding 
and you only use it for streaming.  It generally decodes into 8 or 16 
bit characters.