[tex4ht] Why tex4ht changes apostrophe to Right Single Quotation Mark?

[Nasser M. Abbasi]

On 1/9/2018 11:38 AM, William F Hammond wrote:
>  I gather from this thread that Matlab
> must be using backquotes for string delineation.  There is at least one
> other "big" mathematical program that used backquotes for strings in its
> early years but then, more than a decade ago, abandoned that usage.
> 
>           -- Bill
> 

Matlab uses "single quotation marks." as in example here

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/represent-text-with-character-and-string-arrays.html

I've added the upquote package now (thanks to Michal) and the
problem went away. Now verbatim in HTML looks like verbatim
in the latex input file.

Not sure why a user needs a whole package added just to tell
latex to please keep the single quotation mark (Apostrophe)
as single quotation mark in the output, but this is all
over my head, someone in some committee long time ago must
have decided that is how things are supposed to work for
some good reason. But it breaks things that uses ' if user
forgets to use this package.

--Nasser