Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes? (theatlantic.com) 207
Glenn Fleishman, writing for The Atlantic: Many aspects of website design have improved to the point that nuances and flourishes formerly reserved for the printed page are feasible and pleasing. But there's a seemingly contrary motion afoot with quotation marks: At an increasing number of publications, they've been ironed straight. This may stem from a lack of awareness on the part of website designers or from the difficulty in a content-management system (CMS) getting the curl direction correct every time. It may also be that curly quotes' time has come and gone. Major periodicals have fallen prey, including those with a long and continuing print edition. Not long ago, Rolling Stone had straight quotes in its news-item previews, but educated them for features; the "smart" quotes later returned. Fast Company opts generally for all "dumb" quotes online, while the newborn digital publication The Outline recently mixed straight and typographic in the same line of text at its launch. Even the fine publication you're currently reading has occasionally neglected to crook its pinky.(Via DaringFireball -- John's take on this is insightful.) At Slashdot, we also avoid curly quotes -- and when we miss, you see them as weird characters on the site!
Twitter isn't helping (Score:3)
Re:Twitter isn't helping (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think curly quotes are dead, either. I think they just keep getting morphed into Ã(TM) trash, as can be seen in many past Slashdot stories [google.com].
Re: Twitter isn't helping (Score:5, Insightful)
When it was absolutely essential to distinguish between an uppercase oh and a zero, an easy way was to backspace and type a slash through it. Differentiation between a lowercase ell and a one was sometimes done by underlining the ell to represent the number one, but this was rare.
We got along fine without stupid smart quotes, and they add nothing to readability.
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And those "smart" quotes that appears on and off really messes up some documentation where you document command lines in a document. The straight quotes are good enough, any software that automagically replaces them makes it impossible to do a copy/paste of command lines in documentation and other similar stuff.
So the "smart" quotes and dashes are a good example of how you overdo stuff without providing any real value for the users.
This! Don't change my text without permission! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't give a darn about curly quotes - use them if you want, but it pisses me off when certain Windows and Mac software silently CHANGES my normal quotes to some curly bullshit. For technical stuff, SQL, command lines, or programming code, they are in no way interchangeable amd silently changing them can cause data to be messed up or even deleted. That's not okay.
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As a writer, it's also annoying when automatic curly quotes put the wrong quote in. For example (using curly braces instead of quotes since curly quotes wouldn't appear):
{He walked to the store, { she said.
There's two opening quotes there and the only way to spot it is to look closely. Not hard with one sentence, but try doing that in an entire 60,000+ word novel. (I have. It's not fun.)
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Typography is what editors are for. I'd rather the novel writer be focused on writing a solid plot with interesting characters than worrying about what their software is doing to the things they type.
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Amen to that.
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Not completely true. It depends on the brand. Underwood and Remington have zeros. But yes, curly quotes were a solution to a non-problem.
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I had a nice manual in the 70s it had zero and one but I do remember zeros with slashes.
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There has been great diversity among typewriters layouts. They have not been standardized as much as computer keyboard layouts and characters sets have. Different typewriter brands did not need to be interoperable.
Some brands of typewriters got different keys between I/1 and O/0 back in the early 1900's. Other brands did not separate the keys even in the 1980's.
Among computers and teletypes, the single biggest influence might have been the ASCII character set - which had only one type of quote character.
The
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Curly quotes didn't exist on manual typewriters, and neither did the numbers zero (used an uppercase oh) or one (use a lowercase ell).
Neither did many other useful typographic symbols, but that doesn't mean I want to read a book (or, say, a scientific paper) with notation constrained by what I could have typed on a clunky device from the 19th century.
We got along fine without stupid smart quotes, and they add nothing to readability.
Unless, for example, you're reading an article that actually does use quantities in degrees, minutes and seconds, or a mathematical paper where primes are used for distinction in a mathematical context. Then it's like saying you could still read and understand this paragraph if I substituted
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36:24'57" = 36 degrees, 24 minutes, 57 seconds. NEVER needed curly quotes / opening and closing quotes for that, same as for feet and inches.
Or even 36h24'57" or 36h24m57s. Not too hard for a reader to figure it out using either system.
The sentence Jack said "Take a 2" x 4" x 8' piece of wood and nail it to a 4' x '8 sheet of plywood, 1" from the edge" will come out all f*d up with smart quotes. Easier just to turn them off.
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NEVER needed curly quotes / opening and closing quotes for that, same as for feet and inches.
Well, as several ancient languages demonstrate, you don't need much, if any, punctuation to be able to communicate. It's just that sometimes, the subtle cues from using different punctuation help to communicate a little better.
Easier just to turn them off.
The way you phrase that makes me think your problem is that you're using the wrong editing tools for the job, not that there's anything wrong with more specific punctuation like curly quotes.
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The original standard was everything was hand-written. Even copies. There were no "smart quotes" in the originals, or the copies. Curly quotes are an affectation, nothing more. Same as having two different hyphen widths. Same with m-space and n-space and no-break-space (which people have abused to try to make web page elements not reflow to a smaller widths rather than honor the basic premise of html).
No meaning is lost by getting rid of curly quotes, etc.
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Some news sites have gone straight to embedding Tweets rather than using classic citation. Frankly, I think it's sloppy writing.
This has the advantage that you can not only have immediate visual confirmation that the tweet is genuine, but you can also click through to the original tweet to see any responses that may have been posted since the original article was written.
Believe it or not, some publications even post hyperlinks to their original sources when they're citing material from other sites. The internet: it's a mind-blower, bro, I know.
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that causes a problem later when you try to search your document for and it can't find it because your "smart word processor" changed the quote to a smart start-quote and now you have no way to type that as part of the search string.
The other problem being they aren't ascii so they have to be represented by unicode. Basic text editors are hit-and-miss on their support for unicode, causing a litany of problems. Screwing up character counts and indexing, right/left arrows attempting to step over the ansii
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Good Riddance (Score:2)
They never did anything but cause problems anyway.
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Aren't they the ones that randomly mutate into Â(TM)? Good riddance I say.
Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't they the ones that randomly mutate into Â(TM)?
Any site that breaks them also fails utterly for non-English text or for most symbols. No one sane would use a site that broken, right? Right?!?
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Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Informative)
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Well I don't know what the problem is, then, but if I copy them into a text editor, save as UTF-8, and reopen... I get gibberish back.
Use an UTF-8 compatible text editor then.
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Actually, it is a character set, or really, a set of character sets (including ANSI/ASCII character sets).
No, it isn't. The GP was right.
This discussion is becoming surreal: I'm reading typographical advice from people who apparently don't know the difference between a hyphen and a dash, advice on character sets from people who apparently don't know the difference between Unicode and UTF-8, and advice on the difficulties of programming in the 21st century from people who apparently write their code in a word processor and then copy and paste it into an IDE that can't handle Unicode. It's a good job I only come
Re: Good Riddance (Score:2)
Or, worse, they mutate nearly invisibly when you copy out of Confluence, Google Docs, or any Microsoft product; and paste them into Sublime Text or, gods forbid, the command line; in order to make use of the documentation that your tech writer has proofed and decided to "improve" in order to make it look "professional".
Not just good riddance. But curly quotes, em-dashes, and all that other "smart" or "pretty" formatting garbage makes me want to find the Unicode monkeys who inflicted it on us and hit them re
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Love em-dashes. I had some linux eBook once where every double dash had been replaced with one, presumably by some utter mong of a typesetter.
Great when you copy-paste something.
Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
Curly quotes, like serif fonts, make text less fatiguing to read. Typesetting is a very mature science.
We have the screen resolutions now to allow screen text to benefit from some of the optimization that is present in print (especially phones, where the pixel density it starting to get high enough to make real fonts work). Sadly, the web is infested with "designers", who only want the site to look trendy and care not a bit about the reader.
Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Funny)
Come on, man. You could have at least tried to write “designers”.
Re:Good Riddance (Score:4, Interesting)
Well played, sir, well played.
But I actually didn't know /. supported those non-7-bit-ascii characters - that's new!
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Well played, sir, well played.
But I actually didn't know /. supported those non-7-bit-ascii characters - that's new!
What site ever supported only ASCII? Computers have been 8-bit for a long time, at worst they are latin-1. If I remember correctly slashdot was converted to UTF-8 way-back but just had it mostly disabled with some kind of limited white-list. Let me check: æøå×€£çß
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The whitelist was very very short until quite recently. Certainly a smaller set than 8-bit ascii.
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It was certainly studied, with large (for the time) research budgets. If you look at printed works from the early days, you'll see how far typography has come. Of course it was mostly guesswork before the Enlightenment, as the scientific method didn't exist yet.
Incunabulum were printed with some pretty terrible fonts as late as the 15th century. The "roman" fonts that started in the 1470s were worlds better - but at first the serifs really weren't helping. They were there by accident/legacy, but they wer
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BTW, the Optima font is a great example of how variable line widths can almost replace the need for serifs. I wouldn't want to read a book set in it, but it's great for headings above a serif font.
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Freaking slashcode. https://www.fonts.com/font/lin... [fonts.com]
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Curly quotes, like serif fonts, make text less fatiguing to read.
I call bullshit. Serif fonts are indeed less fatiguing but curly quotes are nonsense, always have been, and always will be. They convey absolutely zero useful information beyond what simple straight quotes do and they are not easier on the eyes in any way.
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As others have said, they give your eyes more information about open vs close. They're a simplified, less noisy form of how some other cultures do the same thing, with guillemets. Sadly, Slashdot's minimal Unicode support doesn't include those.
Like serifs, every hint helps when it comes to reading speed and fatigue, even though you'll never care when reading short amounts of text.
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I call bullshit. Serif fonts are indeed less fatiguing but curly quotes are nonsense, always have been, and always will be.
What's your take on curly commas and semicolons, btw?
Personally I think a book that's typeset in a serif font with straight quotes would look really bizarre and would be really annoying to read.
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What's your take on curly commas and semicolons, btw?/quote>
Curly commas are stylistic but also not critical to reading, but they do go well with serif fonts. I'd probably keep them.
Semicolons- you either love 'em or hate 'em. Personally I think they're a useful construct, particularly as a "joiner" while still serving as a separator. They express that two things are connected in some way but not in the same way a comma does. Personally I find semicolons very useful.
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By virtue of having two forms (open/close) we get exactly one bit more information.
No. That bit of information is already conveyed by the context and positioning of the quote marks.
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I'm an agnostic on this, but try replacing "curly quotes" by "open and close brackets" and "simple straight quotes" by any single character: say "|" (pipe symbol). In other words, if your argument is correct for quote marks it should also be correct for brackets. Personally I think I prefer a different symbol for opening and closing brackets: why should quotes be different?
That's a whole 'nother discussion we can have here once the shootin' dies down.
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no1 cares 4 typesetting AFAIK u r soon 2b alone in that
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I personally can read sans serif much faster - the letters have clear outlines without flourishes. Serif fonts tire me out, some are almost as bad as blackletter. There are no studies that conclusivly prove the allegedly better legibility of serif fonts. My guess is that people who had these slight comprehension difficulties with reading sans serif were simply more familiar with serif fonts. Younger generatios, who are nowadays more familiar with computers than with books, will probably find sans serif easi
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"Typesetting is a very mature science."
BS. There is no "Science" in it whatsoever. Otherwise, Typesetting conventions would be the same in London, Paris, and Krakow, which they most certainly are not, as the article points out.
You dirty something denier! The science is settled!
But, seriously, typesetting has had a lot of research done over hundreds of years. Different fonts are optimized for different purposes. Book fonts are different form newspaper fonts are different from headlines are different from anything in a advertisement. And of course things optimize differently in different languages - heck, you'd expect some trade-offs to be different in different cultures (and they are).
Newspaper fonts are optimized for readabil
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Read a book, sir, read a book. Then 100 more. They're good for you!
Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup. "Smart Quotes" or "Curly Quotes" were always a Typesetter's affectation, not universal, and not available in all historic Fonts. They add _nothing_ to legibility; they have no unique function. (Unlike say the m-dash and the n-dash... and nobody gives a damn about those distinctions either.)
While I don't necessarily disagree, there are loads of typographical conventions that could be similarly declared a "typesetter's affectation," just like various irregularities in spelling or grammar could just be declared a "pedantic grammarian's affectation."
There are conventions. Some of them are more useful than others. The convention regarding curly quotes is only really "useful" in a limited set of circumstances (mostly having to do with very tightly set text, where spaces are small enough that ambiguity about the direction of the quote can help parse the text).
But to the headline's question -- NO, the internet did NOT "kill" curly quotes. Standard typewriters never had them, for example. They've always been something "extra" for typographers to add into published material.
And in the grand scheme of things, I agree with you that there are much "bigger fish to fry" in terms of more meaningful typographical conventions that have fallen out of favor in the internet age, like your example of dash distinctions.
Personally, I'd point to the problem of treating all spaces alike in HTML. Yes, you can insert non-breaking spaces, thin spaces, etc. if you want, but most people don't know how -- and the few that do don't tend to bother much. This is an actual legibility issue: for example, where line breaks occur is important. If they occur in certain places, it can create confusion for the reader. Sure -- most of the time it's just a fraction of a second where your eyes skip back and you figure out what's really going on, but in most of the cases the reader can be spared those minor issues with just a few insertions of places for proper line breaks (and places to avoid them).
In general, the internet has basically killed a lot of typography, in the sense of detailed design and typesetting. Sure, it happens on some sites, but even those that seem to try hard often end up with stuff that looks like crap compared to print. (Example -- how many times have you seen drop caps that actually look right online? And yes, they can actually serve a purpose as they did in print -- they help readers quickly navigate around major sections. Without the page numbers of print, one could argue they can be MORE useful. And yes, there are other ways of doing it than drop caps -- my point is that even the sites that attempt to use them tend to look like abominations from a reasonable graphical design perspective that might include some nuance about pushing some drop caps out into the margin by a smidge or pulling in some lines subtly to flow around the letter or whatever.)
I know many people here will argue that these things don't matter. Yeah, a lot of the nuances are mostly aesthetic. But is there a reason that text can't (or shouldn't?) be pretty as well as legible? Or should we all just use black Times New Roman text on a white background with default spacing and formatting everywhere?
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And sorry to self-reply, but I know the two answers to my final questions are likely (1) it's hard, and (2) it makes cutting-and-pasting annoying. To which I say -- (1) it's mostly hard because HTML was originally set up as a text-based medium, not a design engine, but that was a choice made in the era of modems that were creeping along just transmitting plaintext, and (2) are publishers only supposed to care about people who want to copy and paste something, or should they also care about people actually
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I know many people here will argue that these things don't matter. Yeah, a lot of the nuances are mostly aesthetic. But is there a reason that text can't (or shouldn't?) be pretty as well as legible? Or should we all just use black Times New Roman text on a white background with default spacing and formatting everywhere?
Personally I think it could be a user preference, one of the great advantages of electronic text is that it doesn't have to be one size fits all.
“Meet me later in the gymnasium. (Score:4, Funny)
Next to the dumbbells... You'll know me, I got a hat.”
I guess not, then. [threestooges.net]
Hardest part of smart quotes (Score:3)
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The hardest part for any software that converts from straight to curly to get right are contractions with a leading quote: 'twas, 'tis, '12, and so forth. Especially in fiction and attempts at vernacular.
Exactly. It's a particular nuisance if you're embedding examples of another language and don't want the hassle of constantly changing language sentence after sentence (for example, if you're writing a worksheet for a foreign language class) and the other language has a lot of initial contractions.
Are you kidding? (Score:5, Insightful)
First: who gives a flying...
Second: my manual typewriter only had quotes in one direction. So, no, the internet didn't kill smart quotes.
Re:Are you kidding? (Score:4, Insightful)
People who really care about typography or the presentation of their content.
Indeed. Though typical typewriters weren't intended to generate content for mass consumption. Back in the day personal computers were supposed to change that by enabling desktop publication. (Recall the Mac/PC is Not a Typewriter books by Robin Williams.) However as the media for consuming written content migrated from paper to screen, things got a lot more complicated and in some ways a step back is taken here and there. Eliminating curly braces might be one of those small steps back.
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Your opinion or preference does not constitute fact.
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Wow, he was really versatile, wasn't he? I had no idea he was a computer expert as well as an actor.
Weird characters? (Score:5, Insightful)
At Slashdot, we also avoid curly quotes -- and when we miss, you see them as weird characters on the site!
I thought the weird characters on this site were the editors! :)
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At slashdot, we use a comment system from 1988 - no editing, COMPLETELY can't comprehend simple c&p from other applications - and we call it a feature, not a bug!
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No shit, and good riddance (Score:2)
The whole smartquote thing is a bloody nightmare. One app did it, another app didn't, and when you copied data from one to the other, all hell would break lose.
It didn't matter for print. Print was print. You did whatever you wanted, and people would generally figure out what you were trying to do.
But on digital devices, everyone has to agree on every miniscule little detail so things get transferred properly, get displayed properly, etc. And unless you were literally born yesterday, you would know that
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Part of the issue was that one version of 'smart quotes' is only valid in specific windows character sets. Hence the brokenness when it goes through any system using a different character set/locale.
And unless care is taken you end up with sites claiming to be iso-8859-1 or similar in their headers but also including UTF-8 or the windows charset stuff and it just looks horrible with junk where the 'smart quotes' should be.
Daring fireball? (Score:2)
Is still a thing?
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He's been doing the site full-time for many years and his annual income is well into six figures. [daringfireball.net] You tell me if it's still "a thing".
Smart quotes break technical content (Score:5, Insightful)
One problem with smart quotes is that you can't enter source code, or anything machine-readable, into an editor that uses smart quotes. I am sure many of us here have pasted something from documentation into XML or source-code, only to have it fail because the compiler doesn't want them.
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While I have done that and it sucked - I never blamed smart quotes. I blamed the OS, editor, and/or compiler/interpreter.
And it's been years since I've seen that issue. I'm guessing some combination of the tools I use finally got it right.
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Re:Smart quotes break technical content (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly the main problem with them is that they're not smart--most implementations are pretty buggy and annoying, and it's ultimately easier to turn the 'feature' off than have to grovel over any text of decent length in order to make sure all of them are right. They'll curl when they oughtn't, they'll not curl when they ought, and they'll go the wrong way, pretty much entirely at random. About the only decent way I can see of making any implementation of an automatic text adjuster so it's not mangling things is to make it so you have to flag things--so it doesn't just cheerfully go altering apostrophes and quote marks, but you have to do something extra (from using a hotkey combo to having it followed by a different character that flags it for the program) to get it to do so.
I did use the latter technique a lot for making my life easier when I was taking scientific and technical notes on a computer--I used particular key combos as placeholders, so I could go back on a unicode-capable machine and insert the proper characters or alter the formatting, since I could type that pretty much as fast as the instructor went. As shorthands go, it worked very well for setting up for later adjustment for proper formatting.
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I just had occasion to look into the reason why curly quotes often go the wrong way (and grow spurious spaces around themselves), and it's because of a quirk (or bug) in how RTF (and exported-from-RTF) handles nesting for formatting codes.
Smart quotes depend on finding ON and OFF codes with a single block of formatting, but RTF likes to put paragraph breaks INSIDE the nearest adjacent paired formatting or on/off code. Which means the parser can't find the OFF code so it uses another ON code, and the user ge
It's killed the question mark and the apostrophe. (Score:2)
Re:It's killed the question mark and the apostroph (Score:5, Funny)
Killed the apostrophe? Surely you cannot be serious!
"I went to look at the car's over in the other lot's".
"These are my favorite's!"
"They're dogs are cute. It like's it's new vest SO much!"
"He want's to go to the movie's with us."
The apostrophe has found success beyond its wildest dreams (or perhaps I should say, "it's wildest dream's") since the general public discovered the internet. Never before was it held in such widespread esteem.
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the hyphen, dash and emdash seem to have taken a beating too.
Blame ASCII, Outlook, and X (Score:2)
This problem has been around for ages:
If you look at early computer keyboard, Apple ][+ [hp9845.net] there is only one type of double-quote.
When the Apple //e came out, it has a modern keyboard [apple2.org.za]
The double-quote was moved to the same key as the single quote.
Part of the problem is that the ASCII standard screwed things up by NOT providing dedicated Curly Quotes. HACKs such as ` and ' became popular on X.
i.e.
ASCII and Uni [cam.ac.uk]
So annoying (Score:2)
Copying code from a blog that uses horrible non keyboard quotation marks is the bane of my existence. So many times I have syntax errors caused by the almost identical looking "curly" quotes that some blogs use. Why? why use these stupid things, just to appear fancy? That people want to "save" them is like someone saying they prefer their software to have bugs in it.
I say burn them. Burn them with FIRE!
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Indeed, they also would confuse us using those fancy text-figure numerals that makes lowercase o and zero indistinguishable, just so that even if you can read and ignore the curly-ness of the quotes, you won't be able to get this other distinction right when it isn't obvious from context. Same for uppercase I and lowercase l in most sans-serif fonts, but copy-and-paste might be able to handle these. It it wasn't for these stupid quotes of course...
It all comes from having overloaded some characters: the A
Some.. old fashioned people still cling to them (Score:2)
Work for the UK Civil Service. Curlies are in the style guide. *eyeroll*.
Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes? (Score:3)
"Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes?"
Good god, let us hope so.
Curly quotes are useless, they convey absolutely no useful information beyond what simple straight quotes do. They're the confetti of punctuation marks and should just die out along with buggy whips and mustache wax.
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They do convey information. It makes the difference between " start quote " and " end quote ".
Parenthesis, brackets, as well as French guillemets, CJK brackets and Spanish punctuation all differentiate between start and end.
From a computer perspective, straight quotes just make parsing harder : you can't quote within a quote without escaping. It is even worse with single quotes being apostrophes. It results in unreadable mess like "Can't open file "'"'"$filename"'"' just because "Can't open file "$filename"
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In almost all cases, notwithstanding your intentional violation of traditional typographical rules above, a start quote has a space before it and not after, whereas an end quote has no space before it. So in ordinary text, curly quotes rarely convey additional information.
The topic is ordinary text, not comput
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The most common way of highlighting special items such as filenames, functions, variables, command-line invocations and suchlike in documentary text is to put them in an alternate font, sometimes italics or bold. In code, quote-characters mark the beginning and end of a string to be displayed, and there are escape-conventions for including the same quote characters within the string as part of it. As far as the compiler looking at that is concerned only the non-escaped quote characters at the ends are taken
They aren't on my standard keyboard. (Score:2)
*sigh* (Score:2)
At Slashdot, we also avoid curly quotes -- and when we miss, you see them as weird characters on the site because our CMS is lame and can't deal with an ancient, well-known, well-understood problem that has been solved by multiple stable, mature, well-regarded open-source utilities for over a decade!
FTFY.
CMS and compatibility (Score:2)
This may stem from a lack of awareness on the part of website designers or from the difficulty in a content-management system (CMS) getting the curl direction correct every time.
LaTeX solved this problem a long time ago.
`` = “
'' = ”
Any CMS should easily be able to make these substitutions as well. For the people commenting about code samples and not wanting smart quotes around their literal strings, this solves that problem as well. For code samples, use "" instead of ``''. Problem solved. Not sure why this is so difficult...
Why not use HTML tags? (Score:3, Insightful)
1950, your code is calling (Score:2)
I thought typewriters had done away with curly quotes some time ago.
Curly quotes are the devil (Score:2)
Goddammit, 2016! (Score:3)
Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes?
Fuck 2016. You've killed Bowie, Rickman, Fisher... and now you've killed my favourite Vaudeville act of the 1920s.
RIP Curly.
Inconsistent codes and rendering killed them. (Score:2)
Word would auto-create them. The user would then copy-paste from word into their fav HTML editor. The resultant character codes would then appear as upside-down question-marks on every other browser except IE.
Then fixing them for Firefox caused them to not work in IE.
The "internet" didn't do it: the browser-wars did.
I thought the opposite. (Score:2)
Ironic (Score:2)
The google query libreoffice "smart quotes" [google.ca] leads to a page that says To turn off smart quotes in Libre Office Writer, so that the double quote character is shown in the document as ” — exactly as you typed it — and doesn’t get converted into something curly [earlruby.org] with the " converted into a right curly quote. And google chooses that for the "snippet" result. Confirmed that my quotes are 0x22, just as I typed them.
The PC is not a typewriter (Score:2)
In 1990s I was fortunate to get some coaching by an old guy on curly quotes, apostrophes, em dashes, etc. when preparing newsletters for a non-profit. He showed real quote marks, not inch and foot pounds. Wordprocessors were becoming common so us regular folk can do are own typesetting. Remember back in those days when printed material looked like ransom notes because uneducated went font crazy? This guy gave me a brief overview, he also was impressed I had my own Strunk and White, he gave me a small book "
7-bit ASCII, the Great Communicator (Score:2)
I participate in a weekly fiction event on a MUCK (a text-based virtual environment, for you young whippersnappers). MUCKs were designed around telnet protocol and 7-bit ASCII. A few years ago some ambitious staffer upgraded this one to work with SSH (which almost nobody actually uses) and UTF-8 (which almost nobody actually uses). Now we can enter text with 8-bit characters! And of course, they usually come out as garbage -- and sometimes even crash the antique client programs that some users still con
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Also, some countries use double chevron quotes instead of curlies. There's less confusion with those.
Then there's the difference in whether punctuation goes inside the closing quote or outside it.
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