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!
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.
Come on, man. You could have at least tried to write “designers”.
Huh? They're in UTF-8 (U+201C=\xE2\x80\x9C and U+201D=\xE2\x80\x9D), as are all Unicode characters.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.