would someone care to post a complete explination of 'SmartQuotes', their uses, functions, etc. I would appreciate it, I have been around for a mere 17 years and don't know to much about ancient things like that.
> would someone care to post a complete explination of > 'SmartQuotes'
I don't think it's possible to _completely_ explain them without a degree in abnormal psych, but I'll try to do as best I can.
We'll begin at the beginning. Remember back to about third grade, when the teacher explained quotation marks as part of your lesson on punctuation? Remember how she made the marks at the beginning of the quote look like little filled-in sixes, and the ones at the end of the quote look like little filled-in nines? Remember how you were taught to write them that way, which lasted until about fifth grade, when you realised any dolt could tell by context which is the opening and which is the closing quote, got sloppy, and started writing them as just a pair of little vertical marks, as you've been doing ever since?
Typewrites, and later computers, draw quote marks the same way you normally do when you write them by hand -- just a simple pair of vertical marks, the same for introducing or closing a quote. This was formalised by ASCII, and all was well.
Then, Microsoft got complaints from third-grade teachers, who were adamant that the introductory and closing marks should be _different_. No reason was given for this, but Microsoft didn't need a reason; consumers were complaining, and they had to "fix" it. So, when they did Windows 3, since they were throwing out their old character set (extended ASCII, which was actually created by IBM) anyway, they included 66-quote and 99-quote characters in their new set, in the upper (above 127) half of the set. This allowed users to enter the special quote marks using the Character Map utility. If they'd stopped there, everything would be fine, but of course they didn't stop there. The keyboard didn't provide 66-quote and 99-quote keys. Had they introduced a re-engineered keyboard with keys for that (as well as the usual " key), all would have been well, but instead they did a very very ugly kludge: when they created the Windows version of MS Word (previously available for DOS and Mac), they included a feature wherein typing " after a space would enter the 66-quote, and typing " followed by a space would cause the " to be changed into a 99-quote. Somewhere along the line, this abomination became the default. The official Microsoft name for this misfeature is "SmartQuotes". For reasons that aren't clear, it has spread to applications other than MS Word and even become popular in some circles.
Fortunately, most applications provide the ability to turn this behavior off.
What does a Microsoft programming team do when told to change the way quotation marks look?
They add altered vector images of quotation marks to a data area reserved for control characters, violating TWO international standards, making pages created with the characters incompatible with every browser on earth except the Microsoft browser that the same team "fixes", and calls it "Smart"
Can you Meta Moderate? If NOT, then you too have been selected for the Blacklist [slashdot.org]. If SO, you probably post too often to moderate (I only get mod when I don't post for a week or so).
You can't, get a new account. You have to severly abuse your powers or have participated in one of the infamous threads of death to be "rtbl"ed. Btw, fuck smart quotes.
I put "still see them" - but I'm not sure the poll was referring to the same thing I think of when I hear "smart quotes".
I usually think of Word when I hear those terms - and yes, I still see word documents with smart quotes (I actually turn them off most of the time - because they mess up after a while and you can't get them turned back around to the way you want them).
But I think the poll was referring to some sort of browser technology - never seen that.
Yeah, Word's smart quotes are what I thought of first too. I keep smart quotes, and a lot of other Word features, turned off simply because they can be a PITB when you try to export to ASCII text or some other format.
...And before I get flamed for using Word to create documents that will eventually be exported to plain text, two words: Reviewer Mode.
It's talking about how you go to a page, and instead of seeing apostrophies and quotation marks, you see question marks. This is because Microsoft-based HTML editors add non-standard characters instead of normal quotation marks, kinda like using forward and back ticks to quote in plaintext (like ``this''), except it's automatic and creates a character many browsers don't understand.
Since these aren't standard characters, Mozilla (among other browsers) renders them like ?this? instead. This happens with apostrophies, too, because it'll put in a curly-apostrophe instead of a standard one, which can't render in standards-compliant browsers.
"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter
how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first,
and is waiting for it." -- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
I once worked for a guy who has the distinction of being the youngest commissioned Alberta Land Surveyor in history [He was 21]. He was extremely smart when it came to crunching numbers and statistics but his spelling was atrocious. He once asked me how to spell "where"; he thought it was "ware", but he wasn't selling anything.
Well - momma always told me there was someone out there who would like me for me...
So somewhere out there, there has to be a girl who thinks that someone who's been sitting in front of a computer for 3 days without sleeping, smells of beer and cigarette smoke, and is bug-eyed from staring at the screen and twitchy from drinking Jolt cola is cute.
Now where to find her....maybe I should move into a 24 hr. computer lab.
If you see two quotation marks that are different, you're seeing smart quotes. If you're using a browser that doesn't support those characters, you'll see empty squares or something.
As I understand it, smart quotes are basically a microsoft extension to various character sets: MS software renders them fine, most other software doesn't.
I was considering viewing the source of this page to see what you did, but then I realized that it wasn't worth the time to wade through all the bonus slashdot html that's up top!
(Yes, I know i could just do a find... but then what good is the joke!)
The Mac OS X text object is a beautiful, beautiful thing. It's the reason I won't use non-Cocoa apps anymore. I get built-in spell checking, beautiful rendering, really cool multinational text input, and more for free.
The coolest part for me is the Unicode support. When you enter a diacritical in any language (Hebrew, Thai, Tagbanwa, you name it,) it actually becomes part of the next character you use. That lets you compose some pretty snazzy compound letters in the languages that call for such things. I get endless joy just from entering characters in my OS. That;s good enough for me:)
Interesting, in Mozilla 1.0 under Linux, I see the "smart quotes" as regular quotes. According to my Mozilla preferences, my font is adobe-times-iso8859-1.
As I understand it, smart quotes are basically a microsoft extension to various character sets: MS software renders them fine, most other software doesn't.
"Smart quotes" have been used for years in typesetting, even before computers were around. They were in use by the first Macintosh computers and have been in use on Macs ever since. You can find them in almost all good TrueType character sets. The plain double quote, the left double quote, and the right double quote are all separate characters. On a Mac with a US QWERTY keyboard you can get the plain double quote by typing shift-', the left double by typing option-[, and the right double by typing shift-option-[. If you have another keyboard setup you can find these characters by using the KeyCaps utility which comes with your Mac.
What is sort-of-new is software that auto-detects whether a pair of regular quotes should be translated into a set of "smart quotes". You see, When most people type on a keyboard, they only use the plain quote because it is easiest to remember and use. You can use the left double quote or right double quote also if you know the key combination for them. A piece of software that does "smart quotes" will translate pairs of plain quotes into a left quote and a right quote, hopefully at the correct place. Again, this is not a Microsoft innovation. This has been done for years by many different pieces of software, Microsoft is just one of many who perform the "smart quotes" function.
Well, yeah, I probably do. But it used to really enjoy sending screenshots to "web developers" I worked with, the question marks sprinkled throughout their pages circled with a big, red, gimp paintbrush;) I mean, that's high quality fun. Fortunately, I don't work with such clue-lacking people anymore.
It^Qs not the ^Rsmartness^S or lack of ^Rsmartness^S that^Qs noticable to people who aren^Tt picky about their typesetting - it^Qs the broken quotes when one computer tries to be ^Rsmarter^S than another instead of using the ASCII that the author wrote, if the author was smart enough to write in portable character sets, or instead of the non-portable character sets that MS and Apple have ^Rhelped^s us with. This kind of breakage didn't originate with Bill and Steve - I've also seen ''smart" quotes built out of a variety of acute accents, pairs of single quotes of various shapes instead of the double-quote that the author used, and other things that you *hope* will never get sent to a compiler that things a ' is a ' and a " is a ".
smartquotes.com, sounds like some investment.com that would use your money for napkins while they eat your dinner that you sold to them since they gave you stock options for a salary and then decided that they actually don't have any products or services so you sell your life in order to feed them since you had to give your family away as slaves and they are the only people you know.
Yeah, set up a webcam link it to voice recog software and quote whatever you dictate when you do the finger quote thing. That would be cool. Or maybe it it wouldn't.
In a browser, I could care less; with 10-point text on a 12.1" laptop screen, opening and closing quotes are all but indistinguishable from one another. Life's too short, right?
But as someone who's worked in design and advertising for the better part of a decade now, seeing "dumb quotes" (i.e., straight up and down, not curly) in larger typeset elements like headlines and graphics really hurts my teeth.
It's as if someone painted your apartment walls and forgot to tape the mouldings. Those stray spots of paint are small in comparison to the overall job, just like dumb quotes are to text, but they're a telltale sign of shoddy work.
Insult to injury: mistaking "it's" for "its" *and* using a dumb quote, all in the same word. Just come to my house and kill my pets, why don't you? =)
In a browser, I could care less; with 10-point text on a 12.1" laptop screen, opening and closing quotes are all but indistinguishable from one another.
I remember a memo some executive assistant (i.e. secretary with a fancy title) circulated where I used to work. They got their panties in a bunch if you typed '99 instead of `99 on personnel evaluations. (Or was it the other way around? I don't care.) Anyone that nitpicky about punctuation marks has way too much time on their hands.
Insult to injury: mistaking "it's" for "its" *and* using a dumb quote, all in the same word.
I usually notice bad grammar but I don't look close enough to distinguish between smart and non-smart quotes. I wish they'd just use the normal ASCII quote characters and let software that's capable render so-called smart quotes when it parses documents. Then I wouldn't have to see a bunch of question marks instead of single and double quotes.
Punctuation is important, sure, but what really bothers me is when people say things that make absolutely no sense because of either habit or no sense of grammar.
If you say "I could care less", this simply means that you don't care at the maximum possible value (ie, means almost nothing). The phrase is "couldn't care less", which, although hyperbole, actually makes sense and means something in the context in which everyone uses it.
Normally I try to ignore it because it's all around me, but when it's used like this in the middle of a post about how much you're a stickler for correctness, I just have to say something.
We're starting to veer away from the world of typography here, but I'll bite. After all, if I don't defend my willful abuse of the English language, who will? =)
If you say "I could care less", this simply means that you don't care at the maximum possible value (ie, means almost nothing). The phrase is "couldn't care less", which, although hyperbole, actually makes sense and means something in the context in which everyone uses it.
While such literal readings may make logical sense, they don't always make linguistic sense. Which is to say, I can recognize the fallacy in the surface meaning of a phrase but choose to use it anyway for reasons of tone and flow. For example, here's a little snippet from Steven Pinker's well-regarded The Language Instinct [barnesandnoble.com] on the whole "could/couldn't care less" debate:
Consider an alleged atrocity committed by today's youth: the expression I could care less. The teenagers are trying to express disdain, the adults note, in which case they should be saying I couldn't care less. If they could care less than they do, that means that they really do care, the opposite of what they are trying to say....
[But t]he melodies and stresses are completely different, and for a good reason. The second version is not illogical, it's sarcastic. The point of sarcasm is that by making an assertion that is manifestly false or accompanied by ostentatiously mannered intonation, one deliberately implies its opposite. A good paraphrase is, "Oh yeah, as if there was something in the world that I care less about."
Great book, by the way -- down-to-earth presentation, but enough hard science to warm the heart of any geek. (You haven't lived till you've tried slogging through 30 pages of deep structure language trees. Honest!)
I notice that it's always Americans who bastardize common phrases like that. Shame, really.
One more vote for "couldn't care less," proper use of punctuation within quotation marks, and other linguistic niceties that keep us slipping into barbarism!
Oh, back on topic: hate them! What I hate more is the idiots I work for copying and pasting French and other accented languages directly from Word to and HTML document. It may look OK on initial view on their damn Windows machines, but I'm a stickler for my code, dammit!
Forgot to tape the mouldings? You haven't lived. Go down to LA, where the standard paint job (in the less affluent part of town) makes no consideration whatsoever for the idea that some parts of the apartment shouldn't be painted. For example: doorbells that don't ring, not because the wiring is bad, but because the button is coated with 3 or 4 layers of thickly layered paint; doors that don't latch because the hole for the latch is filled in (not to mention the doorknob that can't turn anyway, so I suppose it isn't so bad). Whether the electrical outlet works or not is highly dependent on whether something was plugged into it at the time the painters arrived...
The problem is not so much that people are not using curly quotes, but that MS in their diabolical plan to make everything annoying if you are not using their platform took over an undefined set of control characters in ISO 8859-1 Latin 1 and used these as their curly quotes. No correct platform is going to recognize these characters the way MS uses them unless they are willfully non-standards compliant. Instead we see things like this
I was in Las Vegas a couple of months ago and I couldn't believe how many dumb quotes I saw. I think all the signage in that qweer town were made by the same company -- inches and feet marks instead of quotation marks and apostrophes. Gack! It burns the eyes.
Call it flamebait, but noone probably cares. Everything is smart these days... Smart quotes, smart tags, smart watchamajiggits...
What's the purpose of smart quotes? So the ones on the left side are on the bottom, and the ones on the right side are on top? Or perhaps your language prefers to have them slanted in different directions. Sounds pretty much like (La)TeX to me... Unix has had this for many a years, and look at us now, we gave up on it in our browsers because *shocker* nobody actually cares.
Oh yes, there's the odd literary god who freaks out and breaks the letter 'a' on his typewriter while attempting to type a long scream of agony, but most of us don't care. Admit it. How many of you write your quotes on paper in the "correct" fashion?
I understand the importance of punctuation in order to prevent long sentences that seem to go on and on without a pause break or stop until it is so long that it hardly seems like a natural sentence to speak in one breath or it should at least leave the speaker gasping for air the next couple of second but I hardly see the relevance of the direction my quotation marks are facing.
Besides, smart seems like one of those words you put in front of a noun to make it trademarkable. Another example of this is "My" (My Computor, My Documents, My Music,...).
Enough with this madness... We should start shooting rabits into the sun instead of wasting time on quotes.
The "My Documents" and "Program Files" in Win95 were primarily designed to break any Win3.1 applications and force people to get new ones that could tolerate spaces in file and directory names as well as tolerating longnames. Not only was it blatant and deliberate, it was stupid - of *course* they're *My* Documents - the operating system didn't have an effective ownership and permission system to keep them separate.
Win2000 acctually has separate users, though the My Documents directory is set up to be a confusing mess of what should be symlinks to obfuscate which My Documents are mine, which are the system's, which live on the desktop, whose desktop they live on, etc....
This actually would be a dying issue if MS had paid attention to standards in the last five years. HTML 4's <q> tag [w3.org] is supposed to allow the browser to represent quotations however they see fit (this resolves a few internationalization issues, too).
Most browsers see fit to insert the appropriate curly quotes. Minimalist browsers are free to use straight quotes. The way the allmighty Aieeee! sees fit is to ignore it completely. Feel free, therefore, to use <q>, so long as you don't mind all IE users not seeing anything delineating your quotes at all, or be prepared to resort to elaborate workarounds [diveintomark.org].
Unfortunately, you're still going to have to use entity references for apostrophes, which often appear much more than quotations.
Also, which versions of IE still don't display quotes around the q tag? Hopefully they will be in the minority soon.
Ironically, the "elaborate workaround" explicitly says in the XML and the HTML that it is an ISO 8859-1 document... and then it uses UTF-8 characters not present in Latin-1. So a standards-compliant browser could use just about any character or string of characters in those places. If the browser displays characters not present in the document's character set, how is this better than random browser bugs of the past?
I Thought You Were Talking About the tendancy for *NIX people to ``quote like this'' (or something similar). Why do they do that anyway? Is it a holdover from some time when there was something that choked on "the quotes that I always use"?
I Thought You Were Talking About the tendancy for *NIX people to ``quote like this'' (or something similar). Why do they do that anyway? Is it a holdover from some time when there was something that choked on "the quotes that I always use"?
The reason: quoting like ``this'' is the way to do smart quotes in TeX.
And just for the record I think anyone who stresses about what kind of quotes are being used is completely nuts.
C00L!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
pe0ple have t0ld me that my !!qu0tes!! were t00 ann0ying. but y0u!re a reasonable person, and y0u!ll let every0ne kn0w that anykind of qu0tes, even !!smart qu0tes!! are 0k!
pe0ple wh0 think every0ne sh0uld abide by standards can stick it where the sun d0n!t shine!
The biggest reason for this goofy backtick-backtick error is people typing on old terminals with ancient ROM fonts that display the backtick and apostrophe characters as symmetrical single curly quotes. Of course, as soon as their text is displayed in a more modern font, the mistake becomes obvious. They were choosing glyphs instead of choosing correct *characters*, which is a big mistake for plain text data.
Another reason is that this is a keyboard shortcut in TeX that gets swapped for the real curly quotes. Nothing wrong with keyboard shortcuts as long as the shortcut itself doesn't get into the character stream. If you're not using TeX, don't use TeX keyboard shortcuts.
This backtick-as-quotes error is required practice at Reuters, as ridiculous as it may seem. I often wonder if they ever bother to read what they write after it leaves their ancient amber screen terminals and the quotation marks no longer look good.
The point is that with plain text data, it is important to choose the correct "character", not choose a glyph that only looks good if displayed with an old font.
Fortunately, Unicode provides a wealth of useful characters to choose from, so real curly quote characters are available without having to rely on non-standard encodings (like MS's CP1252 extensions to Latin-1) or ancient terminal fonts. The sooner all systems upgrade to Unicode, the better.
It's a holdover from how quotes used to look in some common X Window System fonts. See Markus Kuhn's page on quotation marks [cam.ac.uk] for some more info.
Warning: people occasionally hold passionate opinions on one side or the other of this debate (should ` and ' be symmetrical or not). (I agree with Markus Kuhn because his reasoning makes sense to me; I think ' and " should be vertical, and that one should use smart quotes [available via Unicode, for example] if one wants curly quotes. But I've seen people argue well for the opposite view.)
Funny, I just finished a web page on commonly confused characters [cs.sfu.ca]. It's slanted towards print typography, but you can see the Unicode character as your browser displays it, alongside the Unicode reference glyph.
All of the characters display as they should in Mozilla on my Linux box. I think the "smart quotes" display as regular quotes on my Sun at work -- not ideal, but a reasonable fallback.
This is the character that you type on a standard (US layout) keyboard with the key that's beside the semicolon. It shouldn't really every be used in proper typography...
Shouldn't that be "It shouldn't really ever be used..."?
You unix people are cute, with your ancient browsers...
well, cute no, but ancient browsers...forgive me but Lynx is the best browser ever, nobody else can beat it for speed, and almost Everybody else sells your Cookies to the devil [microsoft.com]!
"Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity."-- Unknown
"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us." -- Calvin & Hobbes
"Everything worthwhile has already been invented." -- director of the US Patent Office, 1899
"In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take" -- Adlai Stevenson
"He who laughs last, thinks slowest."
--Anonymous
"Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."
--Dark Helmet
"I read somewhere that 77 percent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 percent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves."
-- Jerry Garcia
"Games lubricate the body and the mind."
--Benjamin Franklin
"The Royal Tenenbaums is like Einstein after a motorcycle accident; bits of genius splattered for miles, but not much body. And who wouldn't slow to look at that?"
--The Filthy Critic
"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that is not there " --William James (1842-1910)
These are picked out for the slashdot crowd, there are others, most about midgets, that people may or may not enjoy.
Ben Franklin rules... 'Beer is proof god loves us and wants us to be happy'.
Everything worthwhile has already been invented." -- director of the US Patent Office, 1899
He never said that. Noone ever said that. I know this is off-topic, and that nobody probably cares anyway, but I'm really really tired of seeing that quote time and time again.
While that statement makes good fun of predictions that do not come to pass, it is none the less just a myth. Researchers have found no evidence that any official or employee of the U.S. Patent Office had ever resigned because there was nothing left to invent. A clue to the origin of the myth may be found in Patent Office Commissioner Henry Ellsworth's 1843 report to Congress. In it he states, "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." But Commissioner Ellsworth was simply using a bit of rhetorical flourish to emphasize the growing number of patents as presented in the rest of the report. He even outlined specific areas in which he expected patent activity to increase in the future.
Taken out of context, such remarks take on a life of their own and are perpetuated in publication after publication whose authors, rather than check facts, copy and quote each other. For example, recent publications have attributed the "everything that has been invented..." quote to a later commissioner, Charles H. Duell, who held that office in 1899. Unlike Ellsworth, who may have been merely misquoted, there is absolutely no basis to support Duell's alleged statement. Just the opposite is true.
Smartquotes are fine for stuff that stays in Word. Unfortunately, I find myself taking client's text out of Word documents and putting them into a text editor for custom HTML formatting. Usually the paste brings the smartquotes as-is, and I have to do various search/replace options to get rid of them. It also happens to the apostrophe.
Plain-text paste should convert back to good-old " and '.
If you spend any time on my site, you'll see smart quotes, em dashes, and all other sorts of properly-used typography. It's not that hard to do if you're using some sort of automated content management system. I type `` and '' and the like in the text and have a quick regex substitution in the site engine that converts them on the fly into the proper HTML codes.
A List Apart [alistapart.com] has a wonderful article on typography [alistapart.com] with links to other articles with details. It's a must-read for any Web designer with any bit of self-respect.
Back in the Day, MicroSoft Word, under tools options, had a check box that would turn smart quotes off and on..
As far as I know, this is where it all started..
Sucked when doing language translations, because most of the foreign lang's font's didn't support them..
And would make more work for an editor.. We figured out that we could save like an hour of time by disabling that little check box, thus save money on the editor.
At one point we even calculated, the little check box to save a few grand a month turned off.
Why are they called smart quotes? Many languages use them but I see using them on english web sites as a total non-sense. They proved for so long that they are not needed.
When I'm in a shitty mood -- remembering The Simpsons quotes often cheers me up. Otherwise, thinking about Gir from Invader Zim is sure to do the trick.
Gir to pizza delivery guy, crying: "Thank you. I love you."
If you're using Word, then it's not only the quotes. Word replaces any three innocent ascii dots with a special ellipsis characters, that contains the three dots. It also replaces the ascii dash with it's own dash.
In a back-end content management system I wrote at work, I encountered this problem when some of the writers preferred to use MS Word to compose, and then pasted their work into my system.
Instead of asking/requiring they stop doing this, I created a special filter with a lookup table. The ellipses character was converted back to three dots, the smartquotes were changed too, etc. Any non-recognized characters were stripped (but with a warning first).
Everyone is happy. The text displays fine on any system with any browser - and can even be the value of an XML attribute instead of a CDATA text node.
"shit doesn't get smaller if you draw an UML diagram of the bowel that produced it."
-- Christian Koehntopp And of course the smart quote in my signature.
We had a hell of a time with this on the high school online paper, when once a month we forced the print paper's staff to enter all their stories into our database. Thirty people on Macs pasting news articles from MS Word into Netscape4... if they couldn't figure out that Internet Explorer was also available for their surfing pleasure, they sure weren't going to figure out how to turn off smart quotes in MS Word. Not that I didn't try, but, you know, horses to water and all that.
Next year, when we rewrote all the code in php, some str_replace() statements did the trick.
Smart Quotes are a Microsoft innovation, with all that entails. They are an extension to the ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set, that adds the functionally of two different quote characters; a beginning quote (like a "66") and an end quote (a "99"). A nice idea, but, this being Microsoft, it is not only non-standard, but it also makes all pages that use smart quotes incompatible with both Latin-1 and Unicode, which use the region used for Smart Quotes for additional control characters.
Latley, when I get a telemarketing call, I start asking the dork on the phone questions, and after I've run out of questions (do you own or rent? what kind of computer do you own? what type or broweser do you use? got any kids?) I'll try to remember slashdot polls and ask them. It's fun, it keeps them on the phone for a while, which increases the telephone bills their company pays, and decreases to profitability of telemarketing in general. Maybe not much, but if everyone did it...
Ok, I have to think all of you are too young for this. I'm 33 you see, so I'm a wise old bastard.
Look at your computer keyboard. With a few rare exceptions, it's a straight rip-off of a typewriter keyboard. They didn't have room for every type of proper typographic element, so the typewriter designers cut a few corners.
One was to compress the open quote, close quote or apostrophe, and foot symbol down to what is usually referred to as a 'single typewriter quote'. The other was to compress the open double quote, close double quote, and inch symbol down to what is usually referred to as a 'double typewriter quote'.
We can't blame MS for this, but rather the typewriter manufacturers in the early 20th century who tossed the convention. Penmanship guides (back when anyone gave a damn) included how to write each of these characters - so it's hardly a typographic anomaly.
When 7 bit ASCII was developed, the typewriter convention was continued, but the typesetters worked around it originally in TeX and with other mechanisms. As postscript developed its character sets, it defined an 8 bit, rather than 7 bit set and included the typographic quotes, along with em-dashes, en-dashes, short spaces, and other items that typically drive typesetters bonkers to not have access to.
The Mac was, AFAIK, the first to take advantage of the 8 bit postscript ASCII set, and since Word was a Mac product well before a PC product, you can see how it got slotted in there. The real travesty is that even with this experience, MS adopted a different 8 bit character set so that things didn't necessarily translate.
Apple and MS extended the character set slightly with TrueType and got things more-or-less realigned. Apple extended the set to 16 bits with Quickdraw GX fonts, which I think got swirled up and influenced the OpenType set.
Try this: find an old book. A really old one. Look at the pages and try to find "straight quotes". There are none.
Smart Quotes is not some new Microsoft invention. In the beginning, before Microsoft, before computers, before typewriters, before telegraph . . . BEFORE ELECTRICITY . . . there was the printing press. The art of typesetting developed over centuries of printing books with movable type. A typeface comprises, in addition to "the alphabet", a great many glyphs which enhance the readability, comprehension and beauty of the written language. Opening quotes, opening double quotes, closing quotes, closing double quotes, guillemets, ellipses, hypens, dashes of various lengths and many other glyphs for punctuation, spacing and decoration all have well-understood uses in the creation of printed pages. See the Chicago Manual of Style for an exhaustive explanation.
Electricity begat telegraphy, which encoded a subset of the typesetters glyphs for the purpose of disseminating intelligence over the wire. Lowercase was not used, and only a few punctuation characters were deemed necessary. Control characters were added to the character set to manage the mechanical device at each end of the wire.
Years passed, telegraphy evolved, and the typewriter was invented. It too was a clumsy mechanical device which employed only a subset of the glyphs used by typesetters. The telegraph and the typewriter were both popular inventions, but typesetting continued unaffected by them. Books were printed using the rich set of glyphs offered by type designers and curly quotes were the norm.
Eventually telegraphy demanded a standardized set of characters, and ASCII was born. When general purpose computers were developed, they employed ASCII (check me on this one). Using computers to print books wouldn't happen for decades - a small set of alphanumeric characters was sufficient for computing tasks of the day.
Meanwhile, the typewriter enjoyed huge popularity despite its limited character set. Typewritten manuscripts were not only easier to read, they could be produced faster than their pen-and-ink counterparts. Typists learned new methods of "typography" which were customized for the monospaced lines and reduced character set of the typewriter.
Computers produced reports on printers whose output resembled typewritten pages, and so the methods of "typography" used by typists were incorporated into the ASCII printouts of the day. Meanwhile, books and newspapers continued unaffected, printed by typesetters whose knowledge of non-ASCII glyphs rendered pages far more elegant than those of typewriters and computers. Typists were not taught typesetting, their machines were too crude.
But computer printers evolved. Eventually, they could produce all the glyphs a typesetter could. The computer keyboard did not evolve in parallel. It was still primarily an ASCII input device. So the ASCII character set was "extended" to produce additional glyphs, each computer manufacturer and wordprocessor adopting different character sets. Computer operators knew nothing of typesetting, they had all been trained on typewriters and understood only the monospaced typography of the typist. Only a small portion of computer operators learned how to access the extended character sets - as computerization democratized publishing, most continued to use their typewriter skills to produce printed pages.
Word processor applications began to offer an algorithm called "smart quotes", "curly quotes", "educated quotes" or what have you, which enhanced the "standard typewriter" input by substituting these extended characters for quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, etc. This brought computer printing a little closer to professional typesetting, but did little to correct the "bad habits" of typists. Lacking formal training in typesetting, computer operators continued to (and still do) churn out documents without typographic sophistication, even though their tools no longer prevent it.
When computers became networked, all the incompatible extensions to the ASCII character set clashed. No longer were documents printed immediately on tried-and-true hardware - they were placed on servers, viewed remotely on differing computer platforms, perhaps without ever going to hardcopy.
All the sins of the "desktop publishing" era were washed away. Conversion to crossplatform formats such as HTML was essentially a return to typewriter publishing. Curly quotes and other sophisticated typesetting glyphs were no longer available, but that didn't stop authors from including them in their documents. Only recently have ISO standard character sets and Unicode begun to offer methods for bringing traditional typesetting to today's crossplatform electronic documents.
And still too few have the training to do it "like it should be". Fewer still think it is important enough to even try.
If you're creating HTML, SGML, and XML directly,
perhaps using a text editor or writing a program, I've found (after a LOT of testing) that there is a simple, standard, and portable way to include curling single and double quotes. The solution is to always use something called
decimal numeric character references
for curling single and double quote characters.
In other words,
for left and right double quotation marks, use
“ and ” - and for
left and right single quotation marks (and apostrophes), use
‘ and ’ - and you'll be glad you did.
This approach complies with all international standards, and works
essentially everywhere.
The fundamental problem is that in English, single and double quotation marks are paired and directed, but the original ASCII specification didn't include both pairs properly.
Microsoft "solved" the problem by creating their own nonstandard character sets with the extra characters. It solves it for them in some cases, but keeping track of character sets is a problem for them too, and since it's nonstandard, it doesn't work well for all.
It doesn't even work consistently in Microsoft's products.
The solution noted above works in all charsets, it works in older browsers like Netscape 4.5, as well as lynx, Internet Explorer, and so on. Systems that don't have the fonts will at least back off to a reasonable character when displaying them in general.
> 1995: Bill Gates...Microsoft Windows NT || Secure computing What is wrong with that? MS Windows NT OR Secure Computing, choose one you can't have both!
I use smart quotes in my HTML by using the “ and ” marks. It comes out fine...
That's not any better. If your document is set to be "ISO-8859-1" [unicode.org], then those are control characters, not quotes. If your document is "Windows-1252", then those are smart quotes, and you don't need to escape the values anyway.
Of course, if you are using a Mac to edit those, you have more complex problems, as MacRoman is different [unicode.org] for other things also. If you are, then just type a 'LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH GRAVE' ("ì") and 'LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH CIRCUMFLEX' ("í") instead, and then use an explicit "text/html; charset=windows-1252" content type. Or use a nice Mac editor that does that for you.
Do anything else and you're pretty much just fooling yourself that it "works".
for us clueless people (Score:2, Insightful)
Here: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:for us clueless people (Score:4, Insightful)
> 'SmartQuotes'
I don't think it's possible to _completely_ explain them
without a degree in abnormal psych, but I'll try to do as
best I can.
We'll begin at the beginning. Remember back to about
third grade, when the teacher explained quotation marks
as part of your lesson on punctuation? Remember how
she made the marks at the beginning of the quote look
like little filled-in sixes, and the ones at the end of
the quote look like little filled-in nines? Remember
how you were taught to write them that way, which lasted
until about fifth grade, when you realised any dolt could
tell by context which is the opening and which is the
closing quote, got sloppy, and started writing them as
just a pair of little vertical marks, as you've been
doing ever since?
Typewrites, and later computers, draw quote marks the same
way you normally do when you write them by hand -- just a
simple pair of vertical marks, the same for introducing or
closing a quote. This was formalised by ASCII, and all
was well.
Then, Microsoft got complaints from third-grade teachers,
who were adamant that the introductory and closing marks
should be _different_. No reason was given for this, but
Microsoft didn't need a reason; consumers were complaining,
and they had to "fix" it. So, when they did Windows 3,
since they were throwing out their old character set
(extended ASCII, which was actually created by IBM) anyway,
they included 66-quote and 99-quote characters in their new
set, in the upper (above 127) half of the set. This allowed
users to enter the special quote marks using the Character
Map utility. If they'd stopped there, everything would be
fine, but of course they didn't stop there. The keyboard
didn't provide 66-quote and 99-quote keys. Had they
introduced a re-engineered keyboard with keys for that (as
well as the usual " key), all would have been well, but
instead they did a very very ugly kludge: when they created
the Windows version of MS Word (previously available for DOS
and Mac), they included a feature wherein typing " after a
space would enter the 66-quote, and typing " followed by a
space would cause the " to be changed into a 99-quote.
Somewhere along the line, this abomination became the default.
The official Microsoft name for this misfeature is "SmartQuotes".
For reasons that aren't clear, it has spread to applications
other than MS Word and even become popular in some circles.
Fortunately, most applications provide the ability to turn
this behavior off.
Re:for us clueless people (Score:4, Insightful)
They add altered vector images of quotation marks to a data area reserved for control characters, violating TWO international standards, making pages created with the characters incompatible with every browser on earth except the Microsoft browser that the same team "fixes", and calls it "Smart"
What does a Unix programming team do?
Change the font and go get pizza.
Re:OT: Journals (Score:2, Informative)
Re:OT: Journals (Score:2, Informative)
Hmmmm..... (Score:2)
I usually think of Word when I hear those terms - and yes, I still see word documents with smart quotes (I actually turn them off most of the time - because they mess up after a while and you can't get them turned back around to the way you want them).
But I think the poll was referring to some sort of browser technology - never seen that.
Derek
Re:Hmmmm..... (Score:3, Funny)
...And before I get flamed for using Word to create documents that will eventually be exported to plain text, two words: Reviewer Mode.
Re:Hmmmm..... (Score:3, Informative)
It's talking about how you go to a page, and instead of seeing apostrophies and quotation marks, you see question marks. This is because Microsoft-based HTML editors add non-standard characters instead of normal quotation marks, kinda like using forward and back ticks to quote in plaintext (like ``this''), except it's automatic and creates a character many browsers don't understand.
Since these aren't standard characters, Mozilla (among other browsers) renders them like ?this? instead. This happens with apostrophies, too, because it'll put in a curly-apostrophe instead of a standard one, which can't render in standards-compliant browsers.
Is this a smart quote? (Score:5, Funny)
how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first,
and is waiting for it." -- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
Or did you mean something different?
[Yes, it's offtopic. Get a sense of humour]
Re:Is this a smart quote? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is this a smart quote? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is this a smart quote? (Score:3, Funny)
Please check back once you've acquired an imagination and something resembling a sense of humour.
Re:Is this a smart quote? (Score:2, Informative)
Just my $.02
Re:Is this a smart quote? (Score:2)
And he was a PHYSICS teacher.
Option #4 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Option #4 (Score:2)
Re:Option #4 (Score:2)
So you're saying Unix gurus are cute like tribbles are cute?
Re:Option #4 (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Option #4 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Option #4 (Score:2, Insightful)
So somewhere out there, there has to be a girl who thinks that someone who's been sitting in front of a computer for 3 days without sleeping, smells of beer and cigarette smoke, and is bug-eyed from staring at the screen and twitchy from drinking Jolt cola is cute.
Now where to find her....maybe I should move into a 24 hr. computer lab.
Hey - are you callin' my momma a liar!!!
Re:Heheheheheheh..... (Score:3, Funny)
Now, that's a great mod... *ducks*
Smart Quotes (Score:5, Informative)
"hello world"
If you see two quotation marks that are different, you're seeing smart quotes. If you're using a browser that doesn't support those characters, you'll see empty squares or something.
As I understand it, smart quotes are basically a microsoft extension to various character sets: MS software renders them fine, most other software doesn't.
My browser doesn't support SmartPunctuation (Score:5, Funny)
Odd.
Re:My browser doesn't support SmartPunctuation (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My browser doesn't support SmartPunctuation (Score:2, Funny)
Sure, you joke about it, but GNU Hello [gnu.org] is already up to version 2.1.1 [gnu.org]!
And don't forget kids! (Score:2)
Re:Smart Quotes (Score:4, Informative)
Opera and Mozilla does. All I have available at the moment, I'm afraid...
Re:Smart Quotes (Score:2)
(Yes, I know i could just do a find... but then what good is the joke!)
Re:Smart Quotes (Score:2)
When was that added? I'm using 1.0 and that doesn't work for me. Was it added recently, or is there an option I need to turn on?
Re:Smart Quotes (Score:2)
ãfãf£ã"ksã
ããfdãOEï½-- ï¼æåä
PS There are no âjunkâ(TM) characters in this message, it is full UTF-8 message. It has some Asian characters.
Re:Smart Quotes (Score:2)
Re:Smart Quotes (Score:2)
The Mac OS X text object is a beautiful, beautiful thing. It's the reason I won't use non-Cocoa apps anymore. I get built-in spell checking, beautiful rendering, really cool multinational text input, and more for free.
The coolest part for me is the Unicode support. When you enter a diacritical in any language (Hebrew, Thai, Tagbanwa, you name it,) it actually becomes part of the next character you use. That lets you compose some pretty snazzy compound letters in the languages that call for such things. I get endless joy just from entering characters in my OS. That;s good enough for me
Re:Smart Quotes (Score:2)
Re:Smart Quotes (Score:5, Informative)
What is sort-of-new is software that auto-detects whether a pair of regular quotes should be translated into a set of "smart quotes". You see, When most people type on a keyboard, they only use the plain quote because it is easiest to remember and use. You can use the left double quote or right double quote also if you know the key combination for them. A piece of software that does "smart quotes" will translate pairs of plain quotes into a left quote and a right quote, hopefully at the correct place. Again, this is not a Microsoft innovation. This has been done for years by many different pieces of software, Microsoft is just one of many who perform the "smart quotes" function.
Re:Smart Quotes (Score:2)
So, if you are have ISO-8859-1 for a document and see smart quotes, then the software showing you those is broken.
Who pays attention to this? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who pays attention to this? (Score:2)
Re:Who pays attention to this? (Score:2)
Well, yeah, I probably do. But it used to really enjoy sending screenshots to "web developers" I worked with, the question marks sprinkled throughout their pages circled with a big, red, gimp paintbrush ;) I mean, that's high quality fun. Fortunately, I don't work with such clue-lacking people anymore.
Broken ^Rsmart^S quotes are really noticeable (Score:5, Funny)
This kind of breakage didn't originate with Bill and Steve - I've also seen ''smart" quotes built out of a variety of acute accents, pairs of single quotes of various shapes instead of the double-quote that the author used, and other things that you *hope* will never get sent to a compiler that things a ' is a ' and a " is a ".
Maxwell Smart (Score:4, Funny)
"Ahh the old phone in the shoe trick"
Re:Maxwell Smart (Score:3, Funny)
is that a .com? (Score:2, Funny)
hmm (Score:3, Funny)
Re:hmm (Score:3, Funny)
Re:hmm (Score:2)
A prickly punctuation pear (Score:5, Funny)
But as someone who's worked in design and advertising for the better part of a decade now, seeing "dumb quotes" (i.e., straight up and down, not curly) in larger typeset elements like headlines and graphics really hurts my teeth.
It's as if someone painted your apartment walls and forgot to tape the mouldings. Those stray spots of paint are small in comparison to the overall job, just like dumb quotes are to text, but they're a telltale sign of shoddy work.
Insult to injury: mistaking "it's" for "its" *and* using a dumb quote, all in the same word. Just come to my house and kill my pets, why don't you? =)
Re:A prickly punctuation pear (Score:2)
I usually notice bad grammar but I don't look close enough to distinguish between smart and non-smart quotes. I wish they'd just use the normal ASCII quote characters and let software that's capable render so-called smart quotes when it parses documents. Then I wouldn't have to see a bunch of question marks instead of single and double quotes.
Re:A prickly punctuation pear (Score:2)
Re:A prickly punctuation pear (Score:2)
Punctuation is important, sure, but what really bothers me is when people say things that make absolutely no sense because of either habit or no sense of grammar.
If you say "I could care less", this simply means that you don't care at the maximum possible value (ie, means almost nothing). The phrase is "couldn't care less", which, although hyperbole, actually makes sense and means something in the context in which everyone uses it.
Normally I try to ignore it because it's all around me, but when it's used like this in the middle of a post about how much you're a stickler for correctness, I just have to say something.
Pinker for the defense (Score:3, Informative)
Consider an alleged atrocity committed by today's youth: the expression I could care less. The teenagers are trying to express disdain, the adults note, in which case they should be saying I couldn't care less. If they could care less than they do, that means that they really do care, the opposite of what they are trying to say....
[But t]he melodies and stresses are completely different, and for a good reason. The second version is not illogical, it's sarcastic. The point of sarcasm is that by making an assertion that is manifestly false or accompanied by ostentatiously mannered intonation, one deliberately implies its opposite. A good paraphrase is, "Oh yeah, as if there was something in the world that I care less about."
Great book, by the way -- down-to-earth presentation, but enough hard science to warm the heart of any geek. (You haven't lived till you've tried slogging through 30 pages of deep structure language trees. Honest!)
Re:Pinker for the defense (Score:2)
One more vote for "couldn't care less," proper use of punctuation within quotation marks, and other linguistic niceties that keep us slipping into barbarism!
Oh, back on topic: hate them! What I hate more is the idiots I work for copying and pasting French and other accented languages directly from Word to and HTML document. It may look OK on initial view on their damn Windows machines, but I'm a stickler for my code, dammit!
Re:A prickly punctuation pear (Score:2)
Re:A prickly punctuation pear (Score:2)
?Joe?s computer?s browser?s really standards compliant.?
If you use the HTML entries &ldquo and &rdquo it all renders the way it should everywhere and is standards compliant, so there really is no excuse.
Re:A prickly punctuation pear (Score:2)
Smart quotes, smart tags, ... who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
Call it flamebait, but noone probably cares. Everything is smart these days... Smart quotes, smart tags, smart watchamajiggits...
What's the purpose of smart quotes? So the ones on the left side are on the bottom, and the ones on the right side are on top? Or perhaps your language prefers to have them slanted in different directions. Sounds pretty much like (La)TeX to me... Unix has had this for many a years, and look at us now, we gave up on it in our browsers because *shocker* nobody actually cares.
Oh yes, there's the odd literary god who freaks out and breaks the letter 'a' on his typewriter while attempting to type a long scream of agony, but most of us don't care. Admit it. How many of you write your quotes on paper in the "correct" fashion?
I understand the importance of punctuation in order to prevent long sentences that seem to go on and on without a pause break or stop until it is so long that it hardly seems like a natural sentence to speak in one breath or it should at least leave the speaker gasping for air the next couple of second but I hardly see the relevance of the direction my quotation marks are facing.
Besides, smart seems like one of those words you put in front of a noun to make it trademarkable. Another example of this is "My" (My Computor, My Documents, My Music,...).
Enough with this madness... We should start shooting rabits into the sun instead of wasting time on quotes.
They're designed for incompatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Win2000 acctually has separate users, though the My Documents directory is set up to be a confusing mess of what should be symlinks to obfuscate which My Documents are mine, which are the system's, which live on the desktop, whose desktop they live on, etc....
Smart Quotes right here! (Score:3, Funny)
Max: "Operator, I'm calling from my shoe!"
Operator: "What is the number of your shoe?"
Max: "It's an unlisted shoe, Operator!"
Oh, I thought it said Get Smart Quotes!
Re:Smart Quotes right here! (Score:3, Funny)
Max: "Operator, I'm calling from my shoe!"
Operator: "What is the number of your shoe?"
Max: "It's an unlisted shoe, Operator!"
YA Anti-Microsoft rant (Score:5, Informative)
Most browsers see fit to insert the appropriate curly quotes. Minimalist browsers are free to use straight quotes. The way the allmighty Aieeee! sees fit is to ignore it completely. Feel free, therefore, to use <q>, so long as you don't mind all IE users not seeing anything delineating your quotes at all, or be prepared to resort to elaborate workarounds [diveintomark.org].
Re:YA Anti-Microsoft rant (Score:2)
Re:YA Anti-Microsoft rant (Score:2)
Er...all of them--at least up through IE 6. So lit looks like they'll be in the majority for a while yet.
Re:YA Anti-Microsoft rant (Score:2)
I Thought You Were Talking About... (Score:2)
I Thought You Were Talking About the tendancy for *NIX people to ``quote like this'' (or something similar). Why do they do that anyway? Is it a holdover from some time when there was something that choked on "the quotes that I always use"?
``Quote, unquote'' (Score:4, Informative)
The reason: quoting like ``this'' is the way to do smart quotes in TeX.
Cheers,
IT
Re:``Quote, unquote'' (Score:2)
Ho -hum.
Re:``Quote, unquote'' (Score:2)
Of course sane people write TeX in an editor that converts " into `` or '' for them as needed.
And just for the record I think anyone who stresses about what kind of quotes are being used is completely nuts.
Re:``Quote, unquote'' (Score:3, Funny)
C00L!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
pe0ple have t0ld me that my !!qu0tes!! were t00 ann0ying. but y0u!re a reasonable person, and y0u!ll let every0ne kn0w that anykind of qu0tes, even !!smart qu0tes!! are 0k!
pe0ple wh0 think every0ne sh0uld abide by standards can stick it where the sun d0n!t shine!
(lol)
``dumb quotes'' (Score:2)
Another reason is that this is a keyboard shortcut in TeX that gets swapped for the real curly quotes. Nothing wrong with keyboard shortcuts as long as the shortcut itself doesn't get into the character stream. If you're not using TeX, don't use TeX keyboard shortcuts.
This backtick-as-quotes error is required practice at Reuters, as ridiculous as it may seem. I often wonder if they ever bother to read what they write after it leaves their ancient amber screen terminals and the quotation marks no longer look good.
The point is that with plain text data, it is important to choose the correct "character", not choose a glyph that only looks good if displayed with an old font.
Fortunately, Unicode provides a wealth of useful characters to choose from, so real curly quote characters are available without having to rely on non-standard encodings (like MS's CP1252 extensions to Latin-1) or ancient terminal fonts. The sooner all systems upgrade to Unicode, the better.
Re:I Thought You Were Talking About... (Score:2)
It's a holdover from how quotes used to look in some common X Window System fonts. See Markus Kuhn's page on quotation marks [cam.ac.uk] for some more info.
Warning: people occasionally hold passionate opinions on one side or the other of this debate (should ` and ' be symmetrical or not). (I agree with Markus Kuhn because his reasoning makes sense to me; I think ' and " should be vertical, and that one should use smart quotes [available via Unicode, for example] if one wants curly quotes. But I've seen people argue well for the opposite view.)
Misusing Characters (Score:3, Interesting)
All of the characters display as they should in Mozilla on my Linux box. I think the "smart quotes" display as regular quotes on my Sun at work -- not ideal, but a reasonable fallback.
Re:Misusing Characters (Score:2)
Shouldn't that be "It shouldn't really ever be used..."?
*Nix Browsers... (Score:2, Funny)
well, cute no, but ancient browsers...forgive me but Lynx is the best browser ever, nobody else can beat it for speed, and almost Everybody else sells your Cookies to the devil [microsoft.com]!
Running out? (Score:4, Funny)
"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us." -- Calvin & Hobbes
"Everything worthwhile has already been invented."
-- director of the US Patent Office, 1899
"In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take" -- Adlai Stevenson
"He who laughs last, thinks slowest."
--Anonymous
"Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."
--Dark Helmet
"I read somewhere that 77 percent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 percent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves."
-- Jerry Garcia
"Games lubricate the body and the mind."
--Benjamin Franklin
"The Royal Tenenbaums is like Einstein after a motorcycle accident; bits of genius splattered for miles, but not much body. And who wouldn't slow to look at that?"
--The Filthy Critic
"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that is not there " --William James (1842-1910)
These are picked out for the slashdot crowd, there are others, most about midgets, that people may or may not enjoy.
Ben Franklin rules... 'Beer is proof god loves us and wants us to be happy'.
Re:Running out? (Score:3, Informative)
-- director of the US Patent Office, 1899
He never said that. Noone ever said that. I know this is off-topic, and that nobody probably cares anyway, but I'm really really tired of seeing that quote time and time again.
From this [ideafinder.com] page:
Taken out of context, such remarks take on a life of their own and are perpetuated in publication after publication whose authors, rather than check facts, copy and quote each other. For example, recent publications have attributed the "everything that has been invented..." quote to a later commissioner, Charles H. Duell, who held that office in 1899. Unlike Ellsworth, who may have been merely misquoted, there is absolutely no basis to support Duell's alleged statement. Just the opposite is true.
Re:Running out? (Score:2)
No, that's one of the risks we all take, and I don't even live there.
Pain in my ass! (Score:2)
Plain-text paste should convert back to good-old " and '.
The Right Way(tm) (Score:4, Interesting)
If you spend any time on my site, you'll see smart quotes, em dashes, and all other sorts of properly-used typography. It's not that hard to do if you're using some sort of automated content management system. I type `` and '' and the like in the text and have a quick regex substitution in the site engine that converts them on the fly into the proper HTML codes.
A List Apart [alistapart.com] has a wonderful article on typography [alistapart.com] with links to other articles with details. It's a must-read for any Web designer with any bit of self-respect.
Cheers,
b&
Re:The Right Way(tm) (Score:2)
Awww.. (Score:5, Funny)
"Sir, we're surrounded."
"Excellent. We can attack in any direction!"
Back in the Day (Score:2, Insightful)
As far as I know, this is where it all started..
Sucked when doing language translations, because most of the foreign lang's font's didn't support them..
And would make more work for an editor.. We figured out that we could save like an hour of time by disabling that little check box, thus save money on the editor.
At one point we even calculated, the little check box to save a few grand a month turned off.
2 cents
Re:Back in the Day (Score:2)
Of course the time it cost to do those calculations probably cost four grand...
Smart? (Score:2)
A smart quote to live by (Score:4, Funny)
-- Jebediah Springfield
cromulent (Score:2)
Tastes like burning.
I can't wait to eat that monkey.
When I'm in a shitty mood -- remembering The Simpsons quotes often cheers me up. Otherwise, thinking about Gir from Invader Zim is sure to do the trick.
Gir to pizza delivery guy, crying: "Thank you. I love you."
Big deal (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Big deal (Score:2)
SmartQuotes, SmartElipses and SmartDashes... (Score:2, Insightful)
In a back-end content management system I wrote at work, I encountered this problem when some of the writers preferred to use MS Word to compose, and then pasted their work into my system.
Instead of asking/requiring they stop doing this, I created a special filter with a lookup table. The ellipses character was converted back to three dots, the smartquotes were changed too, etc. Any non-recognized characters were stripped (but with a warning first).
Everyone is happy. The text displays fine on any system with any browser - and can even be the value of an XML attribute instead of a CDATA text node.
-CySurflex
Re:SmartQuotes, SmartElipses and SmartDashes... (Score:2)
my favorite smart quote (Score:4, Funny)
-- Christian Koehntopp
And of course the smart quote in my signature.
arr, flashbacks (Score:2)
Next year, when we rewrote all the code in php, some str_replace() statements did the trick.
A microsoft "innovation" (Score:2, Informative)
Smart Quotes are a Microsoft innovation, with all that entails. They are an extension to the ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set, that adds the functionally of two different quote characters; a beginning quote (like a "66") and an end quote (a "99"). A nice idea, but, this being Microsoft, it is not only non-standard, but it also makes all pages that use smart quotes incompatible with both Latin-1 and Unicode, which use the region used for Smart Quotes for additional control characters.
For more info, see the Demoroniser homepage [fourmilab.ch].
Eeeerh (Score:2)
Telemarketer fun (Score:2)
M@
The proper tale of quotes (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at your computer keyboard. With a few rare exceptions, it's a straight rip-off of a typewriter keyboard. They didn't have room for every type of proper typographic element, so the typewriter designers cut a few corners.
One was to compress the open quote, close quote or apostrophe, and foot symbol down to what is usually referred to as a 'single typewriter quote'. The other was to compress the open double quote, close double quote, and inch symbol down to what is usually referred to as a 'double typewriter quote'.
We can't blame MS for this, but rather the typewriter manufacturers in the early 20th century who tossed the convention. Penmanship guides (back when anyone gave a damn) included how to write each of these characters - so it's hardly a typographic anomaly.
When 7 bit ASCII was developed, the typewriter convention was continued, but the typesetters worked around it originally in TeX and with other mechanisms. As postscript developed its character sets, it defined an 8 bit, rather than 7 bit set and included the typographic quotes, along with em-dashes, en-dashes, short spaces, and other items that typically drive typesetters bonkers to not have access to.
The Mac was, AFAIK, the first to take advantage of the 8 bit postscript ASCII set, and since Word was a Mac product well before a PC product, you can see how it got slotted in there. The real travesty is that even with this experience, MS adopted a different 8 bit character set so that things didn't necessarily translate.
Apple and MS extended the character set slightly with TrueType and got things more-or-less realigned. Apple extended the set to 16 bits with Quickdraw GX fonts, which I think got swirled up and influenced the OpenType set.
Let's hope that OpenType is the end of this line.
It has little to do with Micros~1 (Score:3, Informative)
Wow. This group is
and too Dumb to realize it. =)
Try this: find an old book. A really old one. Look at the pages and try to find "straight quotes". There are none.
Smart Quotes is not some new Microsoft invention. In the beginning, before Microsoft, before computers, before typewriters, before telegraph . . . BEFORE ELECTRICITY . . . there was the printing press. The art of typesetting developed over centuries of printing books with movable type. A typeface comprises, in addition to "the alphabet", a great many glyphs which enhance the readability, comprehension and beauty of the written language. Opening quotes, opening double quotes, closing quotes, closing double quotes, guillemets, ellipses, hypens, dashes of various lengths and many other glyphs for punctuation, spacing and decoration all have well-understood uses in the creation of printed pages. See the Chicago Manual of Style for an exhaustive explanation.
Electricity begat telegraphy, which encoded a subset of the typesetters glyphs for the purpose of disseminating intelligence over the wire. Lowercase was not used, and only a few punctuation characters were deemed necessary. Control characters were added to the character set to manage the mechanical device at each end of the wire.
Years passed, telegraphy evolved, and the typewriter was invented. It too was a clumsy mechanical device which employed only a subset of the glyphs used by typesetters. The telegraph and the typewriter were both popular inventions, but typesetting continued unaffected by them. Books were printed using the rich set of glyphs offered by type designers and curly quotes were the norm.
Eventually telegraphy demanded a standardized set of characters, and ASCII was born. When general purpose computers were developed, they employed ASCII (check me on this one). Using computers to print books wouldn't happen for decades - a small set of alphanumeric characters was sufficient for computing tasks of the day.
Meanwhile, the typewriter enjoyed huge popularity despite its limited character set. Typewritten manuscripts were not only easier to read, they could be produced faster than their pen-and-ink counterparts. Typists learned new methods of "typography" which were customized for the monospaced lines and reduced character set of the typewriter.
Computers produced reports on printers whose output resembled typewritten pages, and so the methods of "typography" used by typists were incorporated into the ASCII printouts of the day. Meanwhile, books and newspapers continued unaffected, printed by typesetters whose knowledge of non-ASCII glyphs rendered pages far more elegant than those of typewriters and computers. Typists were not taught typesetting, their machines were too crude.
But computer printers evolved. Eventually, they could produce all the glyphs a typesetter could. The computer keyboard did not evolve in parallel. It was still primarily an ASCII input device. So the ASCII character set was "extended" to produce additional glyphs, each computer manufacturer and wordprocessor adopting different character sets. Computer operators knew nothing of typesetting, they had all been trained on typewriters and understood only the monospaced typography of the typist. Only a small portion of computer operators learned how to access the extended character sets - as computerization democratized publishing, most continued to use their typewriter skills to produce printed pages.
Word processor applications began to offer an algorithm called "smart quotes", "curly quotes", "educated quotes" or what have you, which enhanced the "standard typewriter" input by substituting these extended characters for quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, etc. This brought computer printing a little closer to professional typesetting, but did little to correct the "bad habits" of typists. Lacking formal training in typesetting, computer operators continued to (and still do) churn out documents without typographic sophistication, even though their tools no longer prevent it.
When computers became networked, all the incompatible extensions to the ASCII character set clashed. No longer were documents printed immediately on tried-and-true hardware - they were placed on servers, viewed remotely on differing computer platforms, perhaps without ever going to hardcopy.
All the sins of the "desktop publishing" era were washed away. Conversion to crossplatform formats such as HTML was essentially a return to typewriter publishing. Curly quotes and other sophisticated typesetting glyphs were no longer available, but that didn't stop authors from including them in their documents. Only recently have ISO standard character sets and Unicode begun to offer methods for bringing traditional typesetting to today's crossplatform electronic documents.
And still too few have the training to do it "like it should be". Fewer still think it is important enough to even try.
Smart quotes: Here's how to do it right, portably! (Score:3, Informative)
In other words, for left and right double quotation marks, use “ and ” - and for left and right single quotation marks (and apostrophes), use ‘ and ’ - and you'll be glad you did. This approach complies with all international standards, and works essentially everywhere.
I discuss this at http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/quotes-in-html.html [dwheeler.com].
The fundamental problem is that in English, single and double quotation marks are paired and directed, but the original ASCII specification didn't include both pairs properly. Microsoft "solved" the problem by creating their own nonstandard character sets with the extra characters. It solves it for them in some cases, but keeping track of character sets is a problem for them too, and since it's nonstandard, it doesn't work well for all. It doesn't even work consistently in Microsoft's products.
The solution noted above works in all charsets, it works in older browsers like Netscape 4.5, as well as lynx, Internet Explorer, and so on. Systems that don't have the fonts will at least back off to a reasonable character when displaying them in general.
Re:Smart? Hello? Anyone home? (Score:2, Funny)
What is wrong with that? MS Windows NT OR Secure Computing, choose one you can't have both!
“ not "safe" (Score:2)
That's not any better. If your document is set to be "ISO-8859-1" [unicode.org], then those are control characters, not quotes. If your document is "Windows-1252", then those are smart quotes, and you don't need to escape the values anyway.
Of course, if you are using a Mac to edit those, you have more complex problems, as MacRoman is different [unicode.org] for other things also. If you are, then just type a 'LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH GRAVE' ("ì") and 'LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH CIRCUMFLEX' ("í") instead, and then use an explicit "text/html; charset=windows-1252" content type. Or use a nice Mac editor that does that for you.
Do anything else and you're pretty much just fooling yourself that it "works".
Re:Quotes, tags, what's the difference... (Score:2)
It's not much different from quoting Futurama on every HTTP request, as Slashdot does.