Apos
Encyclopedia
apos is a key copyediting term for apostrophe
Apostrophe
The apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets...

 which is a mark of punctuation used to indicate possessive case
Possessive case
The possessive case of a language is a grammatical case used to indicate a relationship of possession. It is not the same as the genitive case, which can express a wider range of relationships, though the two have similar meanings in many languages.See Possession for a survey of the different...

 or omission of a letter from a word. In XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 it is one of only five predefined character mnemonics.

This leads to lots of confusion when users attempt to use the ' designation in a file. While it is defined in XML and thus in XHTML
XHTML
XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....

 most browsers do not recognize it.

The code apos is translated and displayed as a single quotation mark ( ' ) in the all character sets but this can cause some confusion in translating punctuation into languages that have different rules and characters for quotations. Thus there is a need to distinguish this character from quotations in typography
Typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...

. Automated conversion tools are often incapable of distinguishing an apostrophe from single quotations, particularly when it is used as a substitute for the first or last letter of a word.

See also

  • XML character entity references
  • Entities representing special characters in XHTML
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