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The Internet

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!
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Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes?

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  • by TomR teh Pirate ( 1554037 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:03PM (#53579791)
    Some news sites have gone straight to embedding Tweets rather than using classic citation. Frankly, I think it's sloppy writing.
    • by Xenographic ( 557057 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:24PM (#53579959) Journal

      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].

      • by BarbaraHudson ( 3785311 ) <barbara.jane.hudsonNO@SPAMicloud.com> on Friday December 30, 2016 @02:18PM (#53580401) Journal
        Curly quotes didn't exist on manual typewriters, and neither did the numbers zero (used an uppercase oh) or one (use a lowercase ell).

        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.

        • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

          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.

          • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @03:13PM (#53580817) Journal

            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.

            • 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.)

            • Amen to that.

        • Not completely true. It depends on the brand. Underwood and Remington have zeros. But yes, curly quotes were a solution to a non-problem.

        • I had a nice manual in the 70s it had zero and one but I do remember zeros with slashes.

        • by Misagon ( 1135 )

          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

        • 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

          • 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.

            • 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.

              • Dialogue in LibreOffice is a PITA to use with smart quotes, because it doesn't always get it right, especially when editing. Turning it of leaves no ambiguities. Keep it simple, stupid is good advice.
    • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      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.

  • They never did anything but cause problems anyway.

    • Aren't they the ones that randomly mutate into Â(TM)? Good riddance I say.

      • Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Insightful)

        by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:15PM (#53579891)

        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?!?

      • Yes, but it's hard to hack an ATM anyway. It happens once in a while, but they're generally secure, so this has not been a concern.
      • Yes, that's why I avoid them. They're not part of some character sets (including UTF-8) and are likely to turn into some kind of gibberish if you convert text between character sets.
        • Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Informative)

          by msauve ( 701917 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:39PM (#53580079)
          Huh? They're in UTF-8 (U+201C=\xE2\x80\x9C and U+201D=\xE2\x80\x9D), as are all Unicode characters.
          • They're also in Windows-1252 (cp1252) as 0x93 and 0x94, which are control codes in utf-8. However, many web sites using this encoding claim (falsely) that they're utf-8, which causes these characters to fail to render properly. The blame can be shared between Microsoft (for having their own idiotic encoding) and web developers (who don't understand the concept of character encoding at all).
          • 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.
            • by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

              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.

      • 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

        • 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)

      by lgw ( 121541 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:30PM (#53580011) Journal

      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.

      • by dinfinity ( 2300094 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:35PM (#53580047)

        Come on, man. You could have at least tried to write “designers”.

        • Re:Good Riddance (Score:4, Interesting)

          by lgw ( 121541 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:54PM (#53580207) Journal

          Well played, sir, well played.

          But I actually didn't know /. supported those non-7-bit-ascii characters - that's new!

          • 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

            • by lgw ( 121541 )

              The whitelist was very very short until quite recently. Certainly a smaller set than 8-bit ascii.

      • by Luthair ( 847766 )
        Science implies it was studied, I think its more likely based on supposition and old wives tales much like 'sports medicine' was for a very long time.
        • by lgw ( 121541 )

          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

      • 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.

        • by lgw ( 121541 )

          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.

        • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

          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.

          • 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.

      • no1 cares 4 typesetting AFAIK u r soon 2b alone in that

      • 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

  • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:10PM (#53579835) Homepage Journal

    Next to the dumbbells... You'll know me, I got a hat.”

    I guess not, then. [threestooges.net]

  • by michael_cain ( 66650 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:10PM (#53579837) Journal
    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.
    • 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)

    by kwerle ( 39371 ) <kurt@CircleW.org> on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:16PM (#53579905) Homepage Journal

    First: who gives a flying...

    Second: my manual typewriter only had quotes in one direction. So, no, the internet didn't kill smart quotes.

    • by g01d4 ( 888748 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:48PM (#53580157)

      who gives a flying...

      People who really care about typography or the presentation of their content.

      my manual typewriter only had quotes in one direction

      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.

      • People who really care about typography or the presentation of their content.

        Your opinion or preference does not constitute fact.

      • (Recall the Mac/PC is Not a Typewriter books by Robin Williams.)

        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)

    by colinrichardday ( 768814 ) <colin.day.6@hotmail.com> on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:22PM (#53579941)

    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! :)

  • 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

    • Yeah. As a bit of a writer, the different standards of various web sites is a real pain, so you end up cutting back and back and back to the very basics to avoid any issues when transferring. Curly quotes actually were one of the better ones as at least most sites had the ability to translate them to straight. But then you get other things: can they understand symbols like % and which ones. Do they do proper bolding and such. Do they understand line breaks. Oh, and my true favorite, which is still a m
    • 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.

  • Is still a thing?

  • by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @01:33PM (#53580031) Homepage

    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.

    • by kwerle ( 39371 )

      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.

    • by Cinnamon Beige ( 1952554 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @02:10PM (#53580339)

      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.

      • by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

        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

  • And maybe they were dead long before the Internet and the Internet is just showing us how illiterate people really are.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 30, 2016 @02:10PM (#53580335)

      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.

    • the hyphen, dash and emdash seem to have taken a beating too.

  • 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.

    ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * =
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 : -

    When the Apple //e came out, it has a modern keyboard [apple2.org.za]

    ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ +
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =

    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]

  • 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!

    • by Ashtead ( 654610 )

      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

  • Work for the UK Civil Service. Curlies are in the style guide. *eyeroll*.

  • by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @02:48PM (#53580631) Journal

    "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.

    • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      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"

      • It makes the difference between " start quote " and " end quote ".

        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.

        It results in unreadable mess like "Can't open file "'"'"$filename"'"' just because "Can't open file "$filename"" is ambiguous.

        The topic is ordinary text, not comput

      • by Ashtead ( 654610 )

        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

  • Only a single (") quote style is available on a standard keyboard. That is what happened.
  • 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.

  • 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...

  • by gregraven ( 574513 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @03:29PM (#53580913) Homepage
    Why not use HTML <q></q> tags? Then if you wish, you can style them in CSS if you wish, to appear as curly quotes.
  • I thought typewriters had done away with curly quotes some time ago.

  • As someone whose job requires them to move between multiple systems with multiple font formatting (or lack thereof) I absolutely despise curly quotes. They make simple two second copy-paste jobs into five minute find-the-busted-character goose chases. For normal everyday usage, please just let them die already.
  • by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Friday December 30, 2016 @04:16PM (#53581247) Homepage

    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.

  • 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.

  • As someone who does book design for a living, I always hated typographical abominations like straight quotes, fake small caps, non-use of ligatures on fonts that really need them (Bembo, Caslon, etc.), but I thought that since Microsoft Word (which like it or not is pretty much the standard word processor/text editor for ordinary civilians) has had "smart quotes" since Word 2003 (or even earlier) that straight quotes would become a thing of the past. I'm still hopeful that they will, especially with Unicod
  • 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.

  • 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 "

  • 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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