I think looking up the numbers for the alternate characters is a PITA, personally, and I don't think I'd do it in a LJ, unless I had a damned good reason. They're not something I'd just sort of normally be able to carry around in my head, after all.
I bet if there were any you used often, the codes would stick in your brain just like certain subsets of the ASCII chart used to be on tap for me. I had to type "CHR$(34)", "CHR$(13)", etc. a lot way back when.
Actually, if I were going to start using the punctuation that HTML doesn't have named codes for in LJ, I would just invent my own mnemonics for them and write a shell script that translated them into the numeric codes with sed before invoking clive (the LJ client I use). Similarly for my web site, since I'm already running pages through PHP before uploading for other reasons, I'd just add some macro definitions for convenient mnemonics.
But yeah, while starting out it would be a PITA. I'm a bit surprised that HTML doesn't use named entities for those marks.
OTOH, I've never really had any reason to learn any of them, even of the punctuation marks I use often, like the em-dash and so on. Besides which, anything other than dumb quotes looks odd in a sans-serif font, especially on something like a blog or LJ or whatever.
Incidentally, go read my tech rant. You're not the only one who has interoperability/accessibility problems at times... :D
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Actually, if I were going to start using the punctuation that HTML doesn't have named codes for in LJ, I would just invent my own mnemonics for them and write a shell script that translated them into the numeric codes with sed before invoking clive (the LJ client I use). Similarly for my web site, since I'm already running pages through PHP before uploading for other reasons, I'd just add some macro definitions for convenient mnemonics.
But yeah, while starting out it would be a PITA. I'm a bit surprised that HTML doesn't use named entities for those marks.
Could be...
Incidentally, go read my tech rant. You're not the only one who has interoperability/accessibility problems at times... :D