Slashdot Mirror
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!
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?!?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
First: who gives a flying...
Second: my manual typewriter only had quotes in one direction. So, no, the internet didn't kill smart quotes.
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! :)
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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?
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.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
Why not use HTML tags? Then if you wish, you can style them in CSS if you wish, to appear as curly quotes.
Greg Raven
As long as there's any left, I'll take mine first.