Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes? (theatlantic.com)

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!

Comments

Twitter isn't helping

[TomR teh Pirate]

Some news sites have gone straight to embedding Tweets rather than using classic citation. Frankly, I think it's sloppy writing.

Re:Twitter isn't helping

[Xenographic]

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.

Re:Twitter isn't helping

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what Twitter recommends, and it has little to do with writing. The way it works nowadays is that the reporter writes the article, and then the publication has editors who go around adding links, finding the source for citations, embedding tweets etc.

I don't like it either.

Re:Twitter isn't helping

[slashdice]

sloppy writing, lazy writing, and a big fuck you to all the readers since what should fit in one TCP packet now requires megabytes of extra html, css, and js. Not to mention another party logging and monitoring you across the web.

Re:Twitter isn't helping

[AvitarX]

What really doesn't help is that our keyboards don't have angled quotes, so anywhere with user generated content is going to need to use straight quotes (or be smart enough to know when it's minutes seconds, and feet inches to automate.

Re:Twitter isn't helping

[v1]

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 one byte at a time, etc.

The first thing I do before using a "smart" word processor is to turn off those smart quotes, hyphens (the double long -) and hyperlink auto embedding. Oh, and try copying some code out of a word processor or website that has "educated" your quotes, into your IDE. oh, those just LOVE smart quotes... (and LOVE to blow up with creative and unhelpful errors, at often incorrectly offset locations as a result of your pasting in garbage)

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[BarbaraHudson]

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.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Z00L00K]

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.

Re:Twitter isn't helping

[Luthair]

Obviously twitter recommends it because they get to plant tracking spyware on every website. What it isn't clear why news agencies go along with it, they didn't put links for the tape recorder or camera used in the past, heck most sites won't even link to other outside sources otherwise.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Oligonicella]

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

Re:Twitter isn't helping

[AvitarX]

CTRL-SHIFT-V handles my pasting needs pretty thoroughly, and the Unicode issues are starting to become less relevant.

As for the dashes, I really hate it when a hyphen is used for an em dash, so that's a substitution I can get behind.

Perhaps it's just due to exposure, but strait quotes don't bother me at all.

What always did bother me is when people `quoted' with a back tick when typing, even if the font angles the apostrophe, it still isn't the same as the back quote.

double ``hatred" for double backtick.

I feel a word processor SHOULD make aesthetically pleasing type, The fact that proper ligatures are used when I get a text message, but in word (granted I still use 2007) I get gross "fi" is incredibly frustrating to me, I find it more obnoxious than hyphen, or double hyphen for em dash.

Yes, it can cause issues for text editors, but a WYSIWYG word processor shouldn't necessarily be text editor compatible.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[pr0fessor]

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

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Misagon]

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 order of characters in ASCII was designed to mimic one convention for typewriter and teletype keyboards for US-English, so that you would have to change only a single bit to get a shifted variation of a character. Then IBM changed their keyboard layout a little bit on their teletypes and typewriters, and that layout led to the US-ANSI standard which was picked up by other brands.
ASCII's order of shifted keys on the numeric still remains in most European computer keyboard layouts.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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 a colon for every full stop: no doubt it's true, but it would be slightly harder, particularly if I happened to also be using a colon correctly as well.

There is definitely an element of typographical snobbery about things like proper use of quotation marks and dashes, and they certainly aren't the most important aspects of good typography, but that doesn't mean that the little incremental improvements you get from careful punctuation and the typography that goes with it aren't useful to some readers.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Anonymous Coward]

...manual typewriters ... [didn't have the]... numbers zero (used an uppercase oh) or one (use a lowercase ell)....

I'm not sure what century you lived in, but the manual typewriters I learned to type on in high school in the mid-70s had them, as did the IBM Selectric in all its incarnations.

Re:Twitter isn't helping

[PCM2]

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.

Re:Twitter isn't helping

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not so much embedding vs classic citation; it's how many news stories are just collections of tweets.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just aesthetically pleasing, reducing the punctuation glyphs to only those available on a standard US keyboard would kill many grammatical nuances.

Sure, we don't need full typography in a tweet. But let's not dictate that our language be restricted to what can go into a tweet.

Re:Twitter isn't helping

[ZayJay]

I'm going to create a Twitter Scrambler. It will turn them all into Shredded Tweets.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I learned to type on ancient typewriters, let me add some perspective.

Typewriters lacked independent characters for the numeral one and the letter (el) "l". They had a large number of features which would only be explained by "it was cheaper to build the typewriter that way".

I would go to printers, which would be the better source of typography than what the typewriter groups have provided. Printers did cast "movable type" for curly quotes, and while some printers might have implemented cost savings by only providing moulds for non-curly quotes, most printing used curly quotes.

So now we are at a point where we need to consider if we are going to massively adopt the early standard, or simplify it as a cost savings measure, where the savings in cost is mostly felt by parties that aren't doing the work. Such decisions are not simple, but denying the existence of curly quotes is likely to create issues if we every intend to represent older works as-they-are, and not as-they-would-be without curly quotes.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[BarbaraHudson]

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.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[BarbaraHudson]

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.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[BarbaraHudson]

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.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[BarbaraHudson]

The underwoods and (iirc) remingtons I learned how to type on in typing class in '71-72 didn't. Neither did the Brother portable I used at home. Ditto the Smith-Corona. IBM was the oddball at the time, being expensive, requiring electricity, and weighing a f*cking ton due to the heavy metal chassis required because of the motor, etc., not to mention noisy as all hell in comparison due to that motor resonating against the desktop even when you weren't typing.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Anonymous Coward]

Limit to the UK standard keyboard; have characters that don't exist on the US keyboard. Like the shift-backtick = not () symbol on UK keyboards.
Or how about setting software to make use of accelerators like alt-# AND alt-shift-# (as # is a primary key on UK keyboards, shifted yields a tilde)

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Anonymous Coward]

The original standard was everything was hand-written. Even copies. There were no "smart quotes" in the originals, or the copies.

Google Defensio Regie Assertionis Contra Babylonicam Capituitatem

“Curly quotes are an affectation, nothing more.”

A great many features of our language, spelling, and punctuation are affectations. I don't see any reason to single out curly quotes. In fact, straight quotes are the aberration historically speaking. Curly is the norm in writing and printing. Typewriters took over later.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[BarbaraHudson]

False. Handwritten documents, which preceded publication, had no curly quotes. In fact, no quotes whatsoever was the original style in older languages. Another affectation which we could do without was lower-case letters. Go look at the original greek texts of the new testament - no lowercase because it didn't exist. Or the original hebrew of the old testament - good luck finding the vowels (and again, no lowercase).

Now let's look at the definitive case for printing - the Gutenberg Bible. No quotes. Of course not, since they weren't in the manuscript versions :-)

You fail, just like "smart quotes".

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even Google the Defensio like I suggested?

It's one of the earliest uses of quotation marks, handwritten, and because they are adapted commas, they are curly.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[BarbaraHudson]

Your claim that publications always used them was obviously false in the face of the very first printed work, the Gutenberg Bible, not using them, and no quotation marks being in existence for thousands of years in handwritten documents. Quotation marks are recent, same as lowercase letters.

Something written in 1651 is WAY too late to claim any sort of historical precedent compared to "prior art" that goes back thousands of years. Especially since I can't find an image of the original that contains quotes - just transcriptions where they have been inserted, probably "for clarity" where none existed in the original.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[allo]

So we need to fix programming languages to support them. And have a syntax error, if the left and right ones mismatch.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be thick, obviously if I say curly quotes were always used, I don't mean before they were invented or when no quotes are used at all.

Just try to find straight quotes (which are not in fact quotation marks) in any of those old printed works. I'll wait.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[BarbaraHudson]

You're the one being thick. NO quotes were used in the first written works. Not curly, not straight. They didn't exist. Bringing up shit from centuries after in an attempt to justify that curly quotes were the norm is bullshit, and you know it.

Especially when bringing up "proof" from a few hundred years ago that didn't prove anything.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Anonymous Coward]

I never said the first written works had quotation marks, are your hormone treatments blocking your ability to read or think?

The first quotation marks used, which were handwritten, were curly, not straight. Got it?

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[BarbaraHudson]

Your "first quotation marks" didn't exist until well after printing got under way. And they didn't exist in the first printed works either. They are, as I said, an affectation. An unnecessary affectation defended by stupid people who don't know the history of writing beyond a few centuries.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[rpstrong]

Turning it of leaves no ambiguities.

And you can also turn off the grammar checker.

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[rpstrong]

I learned on a Royal 440, such as this one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/1.... A close look at the keyboard shows a zero, but not a one - exactly as I recalled. The fun part was going home where my dad was an early owner of the variable spacing Selectric - I was so accustomed to slamming down the 440 keys that I could barely touch the Selectric keyboard without triggering unexpected keystrokes (fortunately, it also had the self correcting feature).

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[Anonymous Coward]

“Steve Jobs taught me that little details separate the mediocre from the excellent.”
  – Guy Kawasaki

Re: Twitter isn't helping

[BarbaraHudson]

And where is Guy Kawasaki now? It's all been downhill after PepsiCo, same as John Scully in the reverse direction. Still spouting marketing bullshit that he learned working for a company that no longer has anything new or innovative to put fear into the competition because now they worry about "courageous" "innovations" that the customer doesn't want. Sometimes you can be so focused on the trees (the iWatch) that you don't see the forest (that Apple is losing market share because they have no new forests to exploit). iPad? Dying. MacBooks? Behind the times. iPhones? Sales down almost 10% last year. Profit down even more - which means they're eating it at the top end.

That decline in focus, in new product lines, is far from a small detail, and Apple is no longer seen as "excellent", no matter how much they want to believe otherwise.

Wait it out

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait one hipster fashion cycle. Curly quotes will come back (and people will get mad over straight quotes going out of fashion).

Has Slashdot Killed Itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I believe so.

Re:Has Slashdot Killed Itself?

[slashdice]

it's like a dozen voices screamed out, and nothing of value was lost.

Good Riddance

[Marc_Hawke]

They never did anything but cause problems anyway.

Re:Good Riddance

[Hognoxious]

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

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Embedding text with "smart quotes" is fraught with cross-platform/cross-charset-encoding issues. Better gone.

Re:Good Riddance

[KiloByte]

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?!?

Re:Good Riddance

[bluefoxlucid]

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.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)
They just sit there and say: "The Author knows about Curly Quotes! Aren't they _Special_!"

Re:Good Riddance

[fbobraga]

No one sane would use a site that broken, right? Right?!?

right (TM)

Re: Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Except most word processors and DTP software has done them automatically for about 30 years.

Re:Good Riddance

[nine-times]

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

[lgw]

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

[dinfinity]

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

Re:Good Riddance

[msauve]

Huh? They're in UTF-8 (U+201C=\xE2\x80\x9C and U+201D=\xE2\x80\x9D), as are all Unicode characters.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nyuk. nyuk. nyuk, nyuk."

Re: Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

"Except most word processors and DTP software has done them automatically for about 30 years."

Why? Just to appease Typesetting Snobs? Just what value do they add? Who the hell cares?
I've heard some pretty preposterous explanations over the years, that Curly Quotes make quoted material easier to read... without a single shred of documented evidence. And note that the usage varies culturally; French Typeset Guillemets look quite jarring to those unfamiliar with them.
Even the Article quotes that they are part of a dying subculture: "They sure do look nicer to old people like you and me, but frankly do they actually add any magical semantic value to a given text? Not really."

Re:Good Riddance

[AthanasiusKircher]

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?

Re:Good Riddance

[lgw]

Well played, sir, well played.

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

Re:Good Riddance

[AthanasiusKircher]

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 READING and whether that's an aesthetically pleasant experience?

Knuth created TeX out of frustration to help along digital-based print typography back when crappy print standards were arguably still a heck of a lot better than what most edited websites look like today. Just something to think about.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to disagree with you, sir. Serif and non-serif fatigueness of the eye is a lie to me. I think it depends on how you where exposed to each. For me, I tend to read a lot of onscreen stuff which mainly use sans-serif fonts. This is for at least 10+ years. When I got across a document with serif font my reading speed drops greatly. I find especially annoying when I read an A4 sheet of paper full of text in serif font.

Or I am just weird and I have an innate preference to sans-serif.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

"Curly quotes, like serif fonts, make text less fatiguing to read."
BS. Prove it. You are just passing on unthinkingly the same old tired BS that made Font Designers and Typesetters feel so self-important... decades ago.

"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.

" Sadly, the web is infested with "designers", who only want the site to look trendy and care not a bit about the reader."
That I agree with. And you are one of them. Clinging on to arbitrary and outdated elements of design, is as bad as arbitrarily creating new ones. You too, care not a bit about the reader, if your interest is petty style over substance.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

UTF-8 is not a character set. It is an encoding of the unicode character set.

Re:Good Riddance

[lgw]

"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 readability at minimum cost in ink and paper. The New York Times (a former newspaper) had quite an R&D budget back in the day, just because printing costs justified it. Turns out high, narrow letters work well for this. Newspaper fonts are not the right choice for a screen, obviously.

Book fonts, OTOH, are optimized for minimum fatigue when reading large amounts of text, with less concern for real estate. Turns out that broader letters, and more leading (space between lines) work well for this. This is a better choice for anything viewed on screen.

In any case, serifs are there to optimize for the way we actually read - recognizing words by their shape, not so much the actual letters. Most serif fonts are designed for the very high resolution you have available from "ink on paper through a lithographic process". Not so many fonts looked good even at 600 dpi laser printing, and even at 1200 dpi some fonts still didn't quite work. Lower dpi, but the ability to anti-alias, will of course be a different optimization as well, but the concepts

still apply.

Meh, we can't even get reasonable contrast on most web sites. At least Slashdot gets that right!

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

It took me several reads before I realized that you used curly quotes, where the other guy used straight ones. My eyes must be SO FATIGUED that I can barely even tell the difference. Oh the humanity! What damage hath the internet wrought!

Re:Good Riddance

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Good Riddance

[lgw]

Read a book, sir, read a book. Then 100 more. They're good for you!

Re:Good Riddance

[Luthair]

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.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Not randomly, very predictably. Simpy an issue of UTF-8 encoded characters being treated as ISO-8859. Of course, a tech site like Slashdot shouldn't have any problem handling text encodings correctly...

Re:Good Riddance

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

You almost understand the issue.

They "were always a Typesetter's affectation", but then you say "The Author knows about Curly Quotes!"

You recognize that displaying text has two people involved, the author and the typesetter.
The problem is anyone can be an author on the web, and very few of those people understand typesetting, because writing and typesetting are two different jobs, and few people are interested, or even aware of, the latter, hence typesetting is done poorly by many.

You are wrong about this statement "they have no unique function". They do have a unique function-- one is an open quote and one is a close quote-- this is similar to how parentheses, brackets, and braces work.

Re:Good Riddance

[NoImNotNineVolt]

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).

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

I really want to agree with you, but this is just plain false:

[...]They convey absolutely zero useful information beyond what simple straight quotes do [...]

By virtue of having two forms (open/close) we get exactly one bit more information. (0b -> 1b). Also they look a lot less like the ditto mark.

James, while John had had “had”, had had “had had”; “had had” had had a better effect on the teacher.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for your reasoned and thoughtful reply, and since I'm in a grumpy mood:
"Personally, I'd point to the problem of treating all spaces alike in HTML."
This is a real irritant for me. Yes, I'm still one of those who double-space at the end of a sentence, even if I know that the convention these days is single-space, always, no exceptions, and most Software will quietly correct me. Note that although the book "The Macintosh is Not a Typewriter" championed single spacing, almost with a religious fervor, the thing is, when I write things out in longhand, which I often do, I put nice reasonably long spaces between sentences. Pretty much everybody does. Double spacing was the accepted Typewriter convention for this normal practice; it wasn't just invented for no reason. (Tabs are another issue entirely...)

"Example -- how many times have you seen drop caps that actually look right online?..."
Drop Caps are actually a favorite of mine in reading, and as you say, they serve a very specific purpose. But there are no standards. Just as there are Font Families, I see no reason why there couldn't have been Drop Cap Families, where the Designers could let their artistic sense free, (And out of the Serifs...). I think that the problem even then was Standards: Postscript or Graphic? And if Graphics, Vector based?

"But is there a reason that text can't (or shouldn't?) be pretty as well as legible?..."
The problem is the definition of "Pretty". Many feel affection for "Johnston Sans", the literally iconic font of the London Underground, copied many times. Yet many Graphic Designers abhorred it; no Serifs, no Italics... no _personalization_. Poetry, well most poetry, would look quite odd in Johnston Sans...
The _text_ should always come first... and Lorem Ipsum is not text. Then can come formatting and Artistic License, under whatever Style Guides are followed.
Hmmm... Poetry in Johnston Sans... perhaps Haiku?

"Knuth created TeX out of frustration to help along digital-based print typography..."
My guess was his frustration was with troff, although I doubt that he ever came out and said it explicitly. troff was eventually a kludge really, but it did work especially well for technical texts of the time. Not pretty, just efficient. (We eventually went with LaTeX, which required two Editors for publication: One for Formatting, and one to check the Math, yet again.)

"Just something to think about."
Indeed. Just don't advocate bringing back the long s. That if the fort of thing up of which I fhall not put.

Re:Good Riddance

[colinwb]

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?

Re: Good Riddance

[SvnLyrBrto]

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 repeatedly with a stick.

Re:Good Riddance

[Carewolf]

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

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it is a character set, or really, a set of character sets (including ANSI/ASCII character sets).

Windows and DOS code pages are NOT character sets, but people refer to and use them as such. Sure, Windows tries to map their code pages to UTF-8 characters, but... whatever.

Re:Good Riddance

[wonkey_monkey]

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.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

serif fonts [...] make text less fatiguing to read.

The evidence for that is shaky at best.

Re:Good Riddance

[lgw]

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

Re:Good Riddance

[lgw]

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.

Re:Good Riddance

[PCM2]

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.

Re:Good Riddance

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.

Re: Good Riddance

[Hognoxious]

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

[lgw]

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 weren't tuned to forming the line. 100 years later this had changed a lot, and you can see Garamond figuring out what worked in the evolution of his typefaces, leaving us a pretty good book font by the end.

By the 1800s, a lot more was understood about variable line widths and how to use them (this is as important an aspect of a good book font as the serifs, IMO). By the turn of the century, printers and newspapers with lots of money were doing real research, as were advertisers, each with a different goal.

Re:Good Riddance

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.

Re:Good Riddance

[lgw]

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.

Re:Good Riddance

[lgw]

Freaking slashcode. https://www.fonts.com/font/lin...

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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 here for the laughs these days. :-)

Re: Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, don't blame the shitty products that don't handle non-latin characters, blame the standards body that allows us to use the full gamut of typography correctly....

Re:Good Riddance

[Kernel Kurtz]

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

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

You almost understood my point...
"You recognize that displaying text has two people involved, the author and the typesetter." ... and those two people are usually the same person these days. Typesetting is dead, and only the affectations linger on, with Hobbyists. I have _nothing_ against this as a hobby, just as I have nothing against Calligraphy... as a hobby...
The NYT retired their last Linotype machine in 1978, and by a decade later, DTP had incorporated some useful, and useless, features of Typesetting, while discarding others. No more inverting a comma Type for an open single quote, for example. (Yes, the convention is really that lazy...)

"You are wrong about this statement "they have no unique function". They do have a unique function-- one is an open quote and one is a close quote-- this is similar to how parentheses, brackets, and braces work."
You have made a statement without making a case for it. Just what is that unique function? Why have separate curly quote marks at all? Why not just use the standard single and double quotes? AthanasiusKircher actually made a point of a very limited use- In very dense text, say a mix of quotes and titles where diareses are involved, curly quotes can set quotations off where context makes them ambiguous... and my answer to that is that this is just bad writing; rewrite it. Use Italics to set off Titles for instance; a practice that preceded Typesetting.
Or why not do what the French did just for quotes or emphasis, use ? (Slashdot doesn't like Chevrons.)

Parentheses can act as indicating a meta-comment. (The text can be ignored or eliminated without changing context.) Whereas a bracketed ellipse can be used to indicate removed text such as in [..., and Journalism.] But as for the rest of them, their original usages were so obscure, (Musical notation.), that they pretty much live on only in Science, Math, and CS. (Curly braces following the Integral Symbol to enclose a complicated equation, while using parentheses within for the littler things; this is also an older convention in Chemistry. And even then, this is really a matter of Style.) They have little use outside of those fields.
Now before Typesetters set to braining me with their hearing horns, (Linotypes were _loud_.), I should note one useful little squiggle- The Pipe: Read "The Naming Of Parts" | Dylan Thomas. (Will Pipes blow up Slashdot?) Read aloud "The Naming Of Parts" as Dylan Thomas would. Before I ever encountered unix, I saw these used in Stage Directions. But this _was_ at Berkeley...

Re:Good Riddance

[nine-times]

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.

Re: Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

"Except most word processors and DTP software has done them automatically for about 30 years."

Why? Just to appease Typesetting Snobs?

No, because professionals care about doing quality work. And they need professional tools to do it with.

Just what value do they add?

Doesn't matter; they are artistic, traditional, and expected in professionally printed works.

Who the hell cares?

Oh... only every publishing house since EVER.

They're essential for producing quality printed works, online or off, but do we need them for email? No.

Re:Good Riddance

[Pieroxy]

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.

Re:Good Riddance

[dunkelfalke]

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 easier to read, even on paper. This is, by the way, why the c't magazine switched to sans serif more than a decade ago. Typesetting is not a science, it is art. And as art it is very subjective.

Re: Good Riddance

[SvnLyrBrto]

Yes, because pretty much every programming language, text editor, and terminal shell ever is a "shitty product". God forbid anyone want to use their computer to be actually be productive, rather than spew out meaningless frippery.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the people who came up with the web didn't exactly make it easy: They split the encoding declaration between the document (HTML) and the transport (HTTP).

Not just curly quotes

[Anonymous Coward]

Languages that use quotes in different ways (like Spanish and the inverted quote, Japanese and the bracket quote) are omitting them too.

Re:Not just curly quotes

[arth1]

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.

“Meet me later in the gymnasium.

[hey!]

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

I guess not, then.

Hardest part of smart quotes

[michael_cain]

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.

Re:Hardest part of smart quotes

[Half-pint HAL]

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.

Not worth the effort

[rgmoore]

Curly quotes are primarily an aesthetic thing. If you are nesting quotes to the point you genuinely need the direction of the curl to tell you what's inside and what's outside, you're doing it wrong. Go back and figure out a better way of distinguishing quoted from non-quoted material and showing the depth of nesting.

I have the opposite problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I create documents where I should be able to cut & paste from the document into the command line, but the Curly Quotes & the typographical dash '-' end up screwing what was pasted. So after pasting, I have to go and edit the command line, and put it back to straight ascii. I had thought it was merely an example of Microsoft's ignorance, and didn't realize they were doing it *deliberately*. Add to that another annoyance, "autocorrect", which "helpfully" puts the wrong word in place of what I had typed, and you've covered why I liked older word processors, which weren't so "helpful".

Are you kidding?

[kwerle]

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?

[g01d4]

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.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Oligonicella]

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

Your opinion or preference does not constitute fact.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Chris Mattern]

(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.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

People who want text easy to read.

Start here: https://www.amazon.ca/Stop-Stealing-Sheep-Find-Works/dp/0201703394

Re:Are you kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Your opinion or preference does not constitute fact.

Neither does yours.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using macros for U+00BB (\frqq in LaTeX) for opening quotes and U+00AB (\flqq in LaTeX) for closing quotes instead of curly quotes for decades.
For me it's mostly a stylistic choice as long as you can distinguish between an opening and closing quote. If I remember correctly I've seen them being used in a the novel Ender's Game, when I read it in the early 90s and really liked that style.

Style does change over time, and it's normal

[Anonymous Coward]

Quotes are a cultural convention, and significant differences between countries and languages exist. I wouldn't be that concerned of it; changes on this level occur on most languages several times a century.

Weird characters?

[colinrichardday]

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! :)

Re: Weird characters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot has editors?

Re: Weird characters?

[msmash]

More news at 11...

Re:Weird characters?

[argStyopa]

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!

No shit, and good riddance

[ilsaloving]

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 people can't agree on a single blessed thing, or even if they do, they can't be trusted to *implement* it properly.

So you are forced to live with the minimum viable product for virtually anything, cause anything else is bloody difficult, and you eventually realize that the hassle just isn't worth it.

Re:No shit, and good riddance

[Derekloffin]

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 major piss off, do they understand tab or do implied tabs, or neither. Google docs for instance REALLY annoys me with that one. Half the time does tab, half the time implied tab. ARGH!

Re:No shit, and good riddance

[Athanasius]

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.

Someone who give a flying...

[Anonymous Coward]

Curly quotes totally screw up programs. They are different than the standard ASCII quotes and compilers choke on them. The sooner that curly quotes disappear, the better.

Re:Someone who give a flying...

[Anonymous Coward]

The sooner you know WTF you're doing, the better.

"The Interwebs": a serial killer

[fbobraga]

call the cops! Call Mom!

Re:I only use straight quotes...

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm a homosexual gay baby.

Daring fireball?

[Skuld-Chan]

Is still a thing?

Re:Daring fireball?

[Just Some Guy]

Turns out.

Re:Daring fireball?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is

Re:Daring fireball?

[sootman]

He's been doing the site full-time for many years and his annual income is well into six figures. You tell me if it's still "a thing".

Re:Daring fireball?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, iFags still jerk off to every one of his posts.

Re:Daring fireball?

[Skuld-Chan]

I should not be shocked at what people want to spend their money on.

I kinda tuned him out when he explained how the iphone 4 antenna case was made out of steel because aluminum doesn't work for antennas.

Smart quotes break technical content

[MobyDisk]

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.

Re:Smart quotes break technical content

[kwerle]

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.

Re:Smart quotes break technical content

[Cinnamon Beige]

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.

Re:Smart quotes break technical content

[Luthair]

I always blame the sites because directional quotes are unnecessary...

Re:Smart quotes break technical content

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear they work fine in perl6 (along with a lot of other unicode nonsense, like fraction characters).

Re:Smart quotes break technical content

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you do, because you're a Lazy Programmer and you prefer that people work the way the machine does, rather than the machine work the way people do. Much easier to take shortcuts and waste the user's time rather than yours...

Re:Smart quotes break technical content

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had a few hassles because in my job, we get specs written on MS Word. For strings of text used in XSLT stylesheets that are then passed to downstream providers. Every now and then, we'll get a hyphen (which has been transformed into an em- or en-dash) or a smart apostrophe (quotes, typically, aren't an issue). Cue wailings and gnashings of teeth when we get weird results in the output.

Having had years of this shit, getting fed up with it, and being tired of trying to get people to configure their word processor in a sane manner (or better still, use a tool better suited for it), I've started to delight in showing that they have exactly what they requested. As was mentioned in Futurama, technically correct is the best form of correct.

Re:Smart quotes break technical content

[Reziac]

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 gets curly quotes pointing the wrong direction.

Same thing with smart single quotes.

Basically, it's bad tag nesting.

Once I got to really examining all the various cases, it was clear it was all one problem that can be triggered by any change in formatting including line breaks, but may look different depending on what else is adjacent, especially when there also a code with multiple manifestations, like that for the M-dash (which has two possible codes, and behaves differently depending on whether there are trailing spaces).

Every RTF editor and export-to-RTF I looked at had the same problem. So it's probably a failing of the RTF standard (such as that is... so many to choose from!) that sorta neglected to specify how code nesting must be handled.

It's killed the question mark and the apostrophe.

[newdsfornerds]

And maybe they were dead long before the Internet and the Internet is just showing us how illiterate people really are.

No. Tab indent tho.

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet and cloud are killing tab indent. Quotes are at least available in web apps.

Blame ASCII, Outlook, and X

[UnknownSoldier]

This problem has been around for ages:

If you look at early computer keyboard, Apple ][+ 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

! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ +
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 Unicode quotation marks

Unfortunately, the X Window System fonts contained for a long time the following mutually symmetric glyphs:

0x27 APOSTROPHE -- end curly single quote
0x60 GRAVE ACCENT -- begin curly single quote

Outlook also fucked things up by auto-correcting quotes into "Smart Quotes".

And of course most compilers are too stupid to understand anything other then ASCII so they barf on as well.

Banning double-quotes isn't solving the problem. Having _dedicated keys_ for them would.

Re:Blame ASCII, Outlook, and X

[Lehk228]

it doesn't need to be a dedicated key, just make it a toggleable option, alt+ either makes smart quotes plain or makes plain quotes smart

ASCII

[Anonymous Coward]

So curly quotes are not part of ASCII, so I haven't had much use for them in the last 30 years.
Are you asking me to switch to some new fancy quote thing when I have not had much need for them during my entire career?

Re:ASCII

[Anonymous Coward]

ASCII was never intended for typesetting, which is where curly quotes are standard.

Honestly, I am flabbergasted that we're still dealing with this in 2016 - the Mac solved it for average users in 1984.

Now if we could just pick standards for line breaks and big-endian/little-endian, we might be caught up to the 21st century...

Re:It's killed the question mark and the apostroph

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's killed the question mark and the apostroph

[Anonymous Coward]

how illiterate people really are

Language evolves by way of simplification over time, and it demonstrates just how large a stick some people have up their asses.

M$ fucks things up with them

[Anonymous Coward]

M$ fucks things up with them by translating quotes into curly quotes which makes a huge fucking difference when you're trying to send a trained monkey instructions for installing or configuring a piece of software.

And frequently, no you can't easily send a script because something may not be scriptable or security on the server won't allow it easily.

Re:It's killed the question mark and the apostroph

[iggymanz]

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

So annoying

[citylivin]

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!

Re:So annoying

[Ashtead]

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 ASCII 0x22 character has been pressed into service for denoting inches, seconds of arc, beginning a quote, ending a quote, ditto mark. Similarly, there is the characters for minus, em-dash, en-dash, hyphen all being represented by ASCII 0x2d. So how do we know which ones we will want to use? I can think of writing prose where the storyline might have to include pieces of programming code, and thus will want to have all these different ones there at the same time.

Re:So annoying

[epine]

Seconded. They don't improve my reading pleasure nearly enough to compensate for how badly they mess up cut and paste.

The Firefox input box has had a bug for years and years where if you "add to dictionary" a word with a curly quote possessive, it accomplishes nothing. If you change the curly to a straight single quote, and then go "add to dictionary" and then change it back to the original curly, only then it's no longer marked as spelling error.

That's just the tip of the curly quote iceberg.

My clipboard allows me to program scripts to rewrite clipboard entries, and my most heavily used script is "filter fancy quotes".

It's a big problem when software infers the fancy version incorrectly, then doesn't leave any trace of the symbol actually entered.

Half the time, I don't even find curly quotes attractive. But I am fussy about mdash and ndash and hyphen. And prime and double prime and times and degree. But I'd rather just burn those curly quotes.

By the way, The Elements of Typographic Style is awesome. I wouldn't self-publish without it.

A history and guide to typography, it has been praised by Hermann Zapf, who said "I wish to see this book become the Typographers' Bible."

Note that I had to use my "filter" script, because the Wikipedia lead combines both quote styles (it's the curly quotes that are not recommended).

See MOS:STRAIGHT.

Typographical, or curly, quotation marks and apostrophes might be read more efficiently, and many think they look better. However, for practical reasons the straight versions are used on the English Wikipedia.

• Consistency keeps searches predictable. Search facilities have differences of which many readers (and editors) are unaware. For example, most modern browsers don't distinguish between curly and straight marks, but Internet Explorer still does (as of 2016), so that a search for Alzheimer's disease will fail to find Alzheimerâ(TM)s disease and vice versa.
• Straight quotation marks are easier to type and edit reliably on most platforms.

All praise to Slashcode for making my point for me.

Some.. old fashioned people still cling to them

[Dr_Barnowl]

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

Re:Some.. old fashioned people still cling to them

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe on old fashioned you mean not a retarded cunt like you?

Re:Some.. old fashioned people still cling to them

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel your pain, bro.

Interesting how much of the style guide gets missed according to temperament though. It's rare to not see ordinals in dates, even though it's frowned upon - at least by my department. Also the number of people who arbitrarily capitalise words seems to be increasing.

If you ever get a communication that's been distributed officially - i.e. (see what I did there?)* by a team dedicated to communications, that doesn't contain at least two howlers, I'll eat hay with the horses.

*Notes for the uninitiated. A couple of years ago, my department declared i.e. and e.g. should be rendered as ie and eg respectively. Only possible reason I could see for this is that UKCS tended to use them both, incorrectly - and this rendered the usage more informal. Next thing we get the message that screenreaders were borking over the newspeak, and therefore neither should be used. Instead, we got briefed to use the longhand forms instead. That this was the preferred option rather than schooling people who had fucked up on the proper use of the style guide saddens me.

Re:Some.. old fashioned people still cling to them

[Anonymous Coward]

"Also the number of people who arbitrarily capitalise words seems to be increasing."
This is not new. Samuel Richardson, the very Printer who popularized the use of "Curly Quotes" in Typesetting, just adored Capitals when it came to his own writing:
"Pamela [...] written to and for particular Friends, on the most important Occasions. Directing not only the requisite Style and Forms to be observed in writing Familiar Letters; but how to think and act justly and prudently, in the common Concerns of Human Life."

Read any newspaper from two centuries back, and it seems that every third word is capitalized, and all sorts of typographic gibberish is thrown in. Although this was probably an attempt to put into written form the styles of oration common then, for a time when a good part of the populace didn't read but had to be read to, it has led to all sorts of "Standard" Rules about capitalization and punctuation that are now prescriptive, rather than descriptive; contradictory and argumentative.
Whether in spelling, grammar, or style, prescriptive rules should always be regarded with suspicion. Dryden, who promoted the rule of never ending a sentence with a preposition, did so out of spite against better authors who did just that. Churchill eventually won that War as well.

But there are also dangers in purely descriptive analyses. "Deprecate" has lost all original meaning due to a spelling mistake, in originally formulating rules for the Network Working Group. What they meant, and made sense at the time, was "Depreciate"; borrowed from the neutral Financial sense, rather than any sense of voiced derision. If one was to say something in a self-deprecating manner today, one might surmise that tomorrow, that "something" may cease to exist, at least officially, and will no longer be supported. (This mistake, rather than being admitted to, was defined in this new manner by Marshall T. Rose in RFC1158. Anybody coming across Mr. Rose has my full permission to boot him in the arse.)

Re:Some.. old fashioned people still cling to them

[Anonymous Coward]

"Deprecate" has lost all original meaning due to a spelling mistake, in originally formulating rules for the Network Working Group. What they meant, and made sense at the time, was "Depreciate"; borrowed from the neutral Financial sense, rather than any sense of voiced derision.

That's not a mistake. "Deprecate" is used in the sense of "disapprove of strongly." That usage goes back at least to the early 20th century.

"Depreciate" would mean it has less value, which makes even less sense.

Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"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.

Re:Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes?

[GuB-42]

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"" is ambiguous.

Re:Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes?

[ortholattice]

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 computer language methods of escaping quotes within quotes.

Re:Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes?

[Ashtead]

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 as meaning begin and end string.

If there is something more of a nontechnical work, say, a novel where protagonists A and B are discussing their concerns raised by the absence of a file and the spelling of its name, it might be useful to show what we could call human and non-human audience quote characters. But here the audience is human, and we are known to be pretty good at understanding even when faced with moderately severe syntax errors.

Consider also the convention in print that long quotations that go over several paragraphs have open quote characters at the beginning of each paragraph, but only one closing quote character at the end. Useful for human readers, but makes for many complications to a system that expects quote-characters to appear in pairs separating what is inside and outside.

Re:Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I've given this a bit of thought over the last couple of days, and I still disagree. Curly quotes don't really convey any additional information beyond what straight quotes do. Yes, they may look prettier, but "pretty" isn't a typographic necessity.

If they did truly convey more information then they'd be given dedicated keys on every typewriter and keyboard made in the last 40 years. They're a stylistic convention (which is okay) but I can't find any substantive information anywhere that seems to show that they reduce eye fatigue or strain, or that they make parsing text easier, including quotes within quotes.

Yes, a lot of printed material uses them but there are also plenty that don't. They're just a alternate set of commonly-used set of punctuation marks, and they don't appear to have any drop-dead utility or urgency in their usage. No one says, "I can't read this without curly quotes!" nor does substituting straight quotes cause any loss of information or meaning. Using straight quotes does not seem to cause the loss of any information or reduce readability.

You read tons of stuff on this site and it all uses straight quotes- have you ever been unable to read something here or been unable to parse the information in the text here because of the usage of straight quotes?

Re:It's killed the question mark and the apostroph

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 Underrate'd

They aren't on my standard keyboard.

[Fly Swatter]

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

Re:They aren't on my standard keyboard.

[Anonymous Coward]

I disable automatic smart quotes in every app I use. However, when I want them, I type Option-[ and Option-shift-[. When I paste text and I don't want formatting changes, I paste without formatting, usually Option-shift-command-V. And if I'm using a site like Slashdot that inexplicably can express less than 0.1% or less of Earth's languages (and only about 99% of English), I stick to crappy ASCII, explanatory notes about what I'm forbidden from writing because of their crappy software, and pantomime or ASCII art for the rest. Or more usually, I just don't post things to Slashdot.

*sigh*

[sootman]

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.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

over /two/ decades.

FTFY.

This! Don't change my text without permission!

[raymorris]

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.

Re:This! Don't change my text without permission!

[Jason Levine]

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.)

Re: This! Don't change my text without permission!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're writing novels, and getting typography right is too hard for you, then please stop writing novels.

Re: This! Don't change my text without permission!

[PrimaryConsult]

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.

Re:This! Don't change my text without permission!

[Anonymous Coward]

> using curly braces instead of quotes since curly quotes wouldn't appear

What's wrong with “ and ” ?

“He walked to the store,” she said.

Re:This! Don't change my text without permission!

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is that you put the comma inside the quotes, and that makes the autocorrect insert a blank, which in turn switches the quote to an opening quote. Of course what it should have done is swap the comma and the closing quote.

Re:This! Don't change my text without permission!

[Xenographic]

Amen to that.

Re: This! Don't change my text without permission!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well they both rendered the same direction, so I think you failed. I'm not sure if I missed a joke or not.
I would have preferred the straight quotes and to fill in with my brain the matching and directionality.

Re: This! Don't change my text without permission!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Well they both rendered the same direction, so I think you failed.

Look closer.

Re:This! Don't change my text without permission!

[IcyWolfy]

Swapping the comma and the closing quote would then make it grammatically (stylistically?) incorrect for American English;
American English requires terminal punctuation (comma, and period) inside the terminal quotation mark regardless of whether they are part of the quotation, or part of the containing sentence structure; other terminal punctuation (semi-colon, question mark), outside the terminal quotiation mark.

British English puts quotation terminal comma and period inside the terminal quotation mark, but sentence structure comma or periods, outside the quotation mark.

Re: This! Don't change my text without permission!

[IcyWolfy]

It's why I use a literary keyboard layout with dead-keys (Windows)
I haven't really explored it too fully, but the characters I enjoy most often are:
alt-gr, minus: hyphen
alt-gr, minus, m : m dash
alt-gr, minus, n : n dash
alt-gr, dbl-quote, 6 : low curly double quote
alt-gr, dbl-quote, 9 : high curly (9) double quote
alt-gr, dbl-quote, comma : low curly (9) double quote
alt-gr, dbl-quote, open bracket : left double guillement ...
and I tend to use combinig unicode, rather than pre-composed now:
alt-gr, dbl-quote, dbl-quote: combining double acute accent
alt-gr, single-quote, single quote: combining acute accent
alt-gr, single-quote, pipe : combining vertical line above

Windows supporting full unicode characters, and multiple chaining dead-key combinations in a simple keyboard map has really made international typing on one keyboard layout _really easy_.

Bias: I type and edit a lot in multiple european languages, and being able to type every character in all european latin-based languages in one layout is heaven. Particularly, all the oddities as well (sharp s, section symbol, pilcrow, etc)

Fun causing rendering issues on non Windows machines (and some windows software not using Uniscribe). Seeing as I have combining characters fully available, adding them to non-expected characters (cyrilling, arabic, hindi, etc) can cause many strange rendeing issues (or causing people phones to crash, OSX to crash) when using non-expected parings: see : http://arstechnica.com/apple/2... for a description of one particular Apple font implementaiton fail.

Re:This! Don't change my text without permission!

[bluegutang]

LibreOffice on Linux does the same by default.

(Come to think of it, there's probably a setting somewhere to turn that off)

Re: This! Don't change my text without permission!

[allo]

Just setup a compose key. Then you just hit compose and the symbols which look like they give the char you want and they will give the char you want.

Re:This! Don't change my text without permission!

[rpstrong]

Interesting to hear. I am a Murkin and grew up with rules as you stated, but much later I started using the British style - it seemed more logical. (Perhaps becoming a programmer had something to do with it). But I came upon on my own, I didn't realize that the Brits were ahead of me.

Thank you, Slashdot!

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

You are exactly correct, and your honesty is like a breath of fresh air. A lot of the time when I see discussions of curly vs. straight quotes on the web, the discussion can be dominated by somebody who authoritatively declares that curly quotes are the one correct way to quote text, and that all other conventions are objectively wrong, improper, or incorrect. (For example, see http://smartquotesforsmartpeople.com. Notice that he even registered a custom domain name to spread his curly-quote propoganda.)

Basically, I'm just saying that I'm glad I spend my time on a website like Slashdot, where people (sometimes) actually use rational arguments, rather than resorting to authoritarianism.

CMS and compatibility

[Rutulian]

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...

Re:It's killed the question mark and the apostroph

[newdsfornerds]

Yor ferge ho eye h4x0r3d ur mamz as last nite.

Why not use HTML tags?

[gregraven]

Why not use HTML tags? Then if you wish, you can style them in CSS if you wish, to appear as curly quotes.

1950, your code is calling

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I thought typewriters had done away with curly quotes some time ago.

Curly quotes are the devil

[nwaack]

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.

Re:It's killed the question mark and the apostroph

[colinwb]

That statement definitely needs a citation of evidence: if true it implies that the first ever language was more complicated than any later languages, which strikes me as unlikely.

Hah!

[Anonymous Coward]

> At Slashdot, we also avoid curly quotes -- and when we miss, you see them as weird characters on the site!

Slashdot avoids a lot of European accents and probably some American, too. It's been a joke since, let me see, uh... forever.

About weird characters, I see them all the time here... some even moderate.

Goddammit, 2016!

[wonkey_monkey]

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.

[acroyear]

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.

[BitterOak]

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 Unicode becoming more prevalent. (Slashdot is an obvious exception to the Unicode everywhere rule.) I do wish, however, people would stick with plain ASCII in (English language) emails, as my e-mail reader does tend to choke on Unicode, but I do recognize that's my fault for using old software.

Smallcaps

[bmomjian]

I think the big loss is the lack of smallcaps use on most websites.

Ironic

[Tough Love]

The google query libreoffice "smart quotes" 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 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

[k6mfw]

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 "The PC is not a typewriter" by Robin Williams (no, not the comedian), dang my comment here on /. shows inch marks.

Though this guy was in his 80s, he kept up with computer technologies. He even showed me he found a new font that is a little different than typical Times New Roman (I couldn't tell the difference) but he was really excited about it as he got cranking on some newsletters. He learned about typesetting with direct hands-on approach when as a teenager he worked at a printing shop where typesetters used the linotype machines, when a page was completed they'd dump all the characters in a box (and there were lots of pages) and he would have to sort each one individually (I forgot details he described but these were not lead characters usually used so couldn't be melted down). It was very tedious and boring so he learned fast about typesetting and printing to find more interesting work than sorting characters.

Re:The PC is not a typewriter

[Anonymous Coward]

"The PC is not a typewriter"

How wrong you are...
The PC, well I'm actually working with Macs, can be _anything_ you want it to be, within its and your capabilities, and if I want my Mac to work like a Remington typewriter, so be it. Between "The Mac Is Not a Typewriter" and "The Macintosh Bible", too much pompous prattle about how things are supposed to _look_ superceded how things are supposed to _work_. (Back in the Day, I used Excel 2.2 and WriteNow about evenly, although Word 5.1 wasn't too bad for filling in HR Forms. I got real work done with all.)
What Typesetting junkies fail to realize is that the vast majority of written material these days will never be formatted to be printed out and bound. And even if it were, there are _no_ authoritative Typesetting Rules, just a loose collection of often conflicting opinions gathered together in Style Guides. British Style Guides differ from American ones, and when the French look in.... Merde! Où sont les guillemets?
Actually, "Quelle horrible surprise!", HTML isn't bad. For one thing, it pretty much _is_ a Standard, and it is quite flexible when it comes to Style. But note this: Most Typographical functions are only available by something like awkward three-finger squashes, which vary from platform to platform, application to application, and typeface to typeface. (Yes, I have "Keyboard Viewer" in my Apple Menu Bar just so I don't have to bother with the silly memorization...) If there really was any demand for easy access to Typographical Functions, there would be a demand for accommodating keyboards, similar to those used on Linotypes perhaps. (And there wasn't much standardization there either...)
There is no such demand.

"Wordprocessors were becoming common so us regular folk can do are (sic) own typesetting."
As I pointed out in another post, Typesetting as a Hobby: Great. Calligraphy as a hobby is Great too. Know and use the subtleties between the Hyphen, the Em-Dash, and the En-Dash. Nest Curly Quotes to your heart's content. Pop in your Pilcrows. And then post your masterpiece in places like Slashdot or Wired or Paris Match... and watch it crash and burn. But it sure looks purty printed out at 1200dpi, and passed around at PTA Meetings.

"...dang my comment here on /. shows inch marks."
Yup. I rest my case.

Re:The PC is not a typewriter

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't the quotes, or typesetting standards. The problem is lame technology.

Technology should aid people in what they want to do, not hobble them. Because doing it right is too hard, it leads people to apathy like yours - where instead of solving the problem, you just say, "fuck it, who needs it?"

Re:The PC is not a typewriter

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad form I know, responding to my own post... k6mfw? I just noticed. Have you ever used one of the Mouse Applications for tapping out International Code? Yeah, not much in the way of typography... but it does get the message across. (Next month, I'm going for my General, and I'm brushing up on Code... because it's fun. Just five decades back, I was a Novice, with a Ten-Tec Power Mite, which I still have...)

Re:The PC is not a typewriter

[Anonymous Coward]

"Technology should aid people in what they want to do, not hobble them."

You missed my point... have you even been following this thread?
-"The PC... can be _anything_ you want it to be, within its and your capabilities..."
It can be a Typewriter, or a "Word Processor", (What an obnoxious phrase...), A Typesetting simulator, a Morse/International Code Key, a Musical keyboard, or even a CAMAC, within its and your capabilities. This is not hobbling. (And yes, I made the transitions from NIM, (PDP-11), to CAMAC, (MODCOMP), to VME, (VxWorks). One has to keep up.)

"Because doing it right is too hard, it leads people to apathy like yours - where instead of solving the problem, you just say, "fuck it, who needs it?""
Boy, have you got this wrong. I'm hardly apathetic, as numerous examples here attest. I'm far more involved, and far more invested in solving problems, than you can possibly dream of. My complaint has been about rigidity- the insistence that there is only one proper and universally agreed upon way of doing things, which certain fans of just _one_ particular Style of American Typesetting are vehement about. (No, the World does not revolve around the legacy of the Linotype and NYT Garamond.)
OK, here's a fun one: I also detest the IPA, (Not the brewed beverage.), which can also be as provincial and arbitrary as Typesetting. The Wikipedia version is particularly obnoxious. That does not mean that I dismiss it. I copied the Wikipedia version into a large Stickie, building up an Alphabet, and then started translating some standard, but relatively obscure texts into IPA, using the Wikipedia pronunciations. I can't duplicate it here; Slashdot would implode, and in any event, it is unintelligible, and a good example of why _nobody_ actually writes in IPA. But the _technology_ makes this possible.

Of course, "...you just say, "fuck it, who needs it?"" _I_ did it because I could, not because it was necessary.

"The problem is lame technology."
The technology is not what is lame here... you are, you utterly dreary person on business from Porlock.

Re:The PC is not a typewriter

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not saying the PC can't handle whatever you throw at it, just that they've made it such a pain to use things like curly quotes, people would rather not bother. If you have to remember to type 'ALT-0147' or use a pop-up character selector, people will avoid using them - that's why the "smart quotes" features were added, so it's automatic. Problem is, it fucks up the output and people don't know how to fix it, which is what I mean by "hobbling."

Make no mistake, if it weren't for computers, nobody would be debating whether to get rid of curly quotes.

As for rigid typesetting (and written English) standards, they exist for a reason. You want to be a contrarian and not use curly quotes, fine. Nobody is forcing you. Just don't assume that because you, personally, don't want to mess with them is a valid reason for getting rid of them.

7-bit ASCII, the Great Communicator

[Zobeid]

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 connect with.

The so-called "smart" quotes have been one of the biggest ongoing sources of frustration at our weekly gathering. Participants continue to struggle and struggle with reformatting their stories to ASCII.

7-bit ASCII has serious limitations, but its simplicity is also its strength. Each character is one byte, and practically every device, old or new, agrees one what character that byte represents. (Thankfully, not many EBCDIC systems around anymore!) ASCII is like Morse code. It's like the Latin alphabet. And often it's more practical to adapt our usage to its limitations than to try and exceed them.

Not everyone from USA/UK

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to look up what curly quotes were.

Video killed the radio star

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the price we have to pay for progress, like how video killed the radio star.

At Slashdot, we also avoid curly quotes

[Eunuchswear]

Of course you do -- slashdot's unicode handling is notoriously shitty.

No, typographic illiteracy has

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet has not killed what you call “curly quotes” and we call quotes. The " is an inch sign and not a quote of any type. It’s not the internet causing the decline in the use of quotes – it’s a generation of “designers” who have never been taught to use them, or never bothered to learn. The same thing is happening to en and em dashes – replaced by hyphens.

Solved problem

[q4Fry]

HTML entities are all in the ASCII range. Just convert to “ and the like for web pages.

No, the typewriter did.

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn your history, or spend 2 seconds searching on Google, idiots.