Are questions about software support of Ukrainian Cyrillic on or off topic?

Question

Here's one question that caused controversy in comments:
What Unicode symbol should be used for Apostrophe?

Should questions about software support of Ukrainian Cyrillic script be on-topic?

Pro's:

1. Many of our users are I.T. professionals so they can answer;
2. We need a quality traffic on this site. If there's a good set of questions on similar topics, this may be fine;
3. One of the top sample questions at Area51 is: How to use em dash and en dash in Ukrainian?, so there may a popular demand on the topic;

Con's:

1. This kind of questions can be only marginally called "Language and Usage";
2. StackOverflow may be a better place; I myself have answered a couple of questions on Thai script (one, two).
   On the other hand, there is no Thai Language site in StackExchange network.

Answer 1

While the specific question about the apostrophe is universal to a lot of languages, some punctuation rules can be extremely language-specific.

For example, French language uses guillemets « » for quotation marks, separating them with a thin space. German language uses reverse guillemets » «. Both questions are valid for their respective stacks:

• Is it necessary to use guillemets when quoting in French, or may one use English-style doublequotes?

• What is the correct way to denote a quotation in German?

English and Portuguese make a distinction between use cases of em-dash and en-dash:

• When should I use an em-dash, an en-dash, and a hyphen?

• Difference between the en dash — and em dash –

For this reason, I believe questions about punctuation and typography of Ukrainian language, including the Unicode implementation, should be part of this stack.

Answer 2

My opinion: some of them are on topic, others are not.

Not on topic: those questions that really have no Ukrainian language specifics. For example, those two questions on StackOverflow that you provided would have totally same answer for Japanese (except for encoding). And I believe that one who posted question knew it, so he/she posted it on StackOverflow.

On topic: questions with ANY Ukrainian-specific information. The question about apostrophe is one of them: there can be traditions (and there are) about using specific code symbols that no non-Ukrainian person on StackOverflow can know, but most of people on this ukrainian.stackexchange.com know. This question is really language-specific: you wouldn't know the answer to question "Which Unicode should I use for Japanese full stop "。")

Answer 3

It was I who objected in that question about the apostrophe, and the reason was I don't consider that question to be "about software support of Ukrainian Cyrillic script". There's no such a thing as "Ukrainian apostrophe", there's no even such a thing as "Cyrillic apostrophe" in Unicode (correct me, if I'm wrong). The problems of "escape characters" and differentiating between apostrophes and closing quotation marks are universal and are not specific of the Ukrainian language alone, software developers working with different languages face them, first of all those who work with English and French which also use apostrophes, I'm sure they've got the solutions to the problem.

That question is about strings of characters containing [Ukrainian] words with apostrophes, there's absolutely nothing of language in it and the component "Ukrainian" is disappearing vague, it could also be English or whatever. If we're Ukrainian Language SE, both "Ukrainian" and "language" should be in a question, that's my point of view. If I ask a question about what a phoneme is and ask to show it to me using Ukrainian words as examples, that will be "language" and absolutely nothing of "Ukrainian". Will you consider such a question belonging here, too?

There're 10 apostrophes in this answer.