Often, people have
curly quotes in text copied from
Microsoft Word, for a long time this was known as the JessicaPierce Bug (see
the Everything jessicapierce bug revisited) and cropped up several times. On machines that can't display the literal
curly quote, it would display a
question mark in the node title or
softlink.
"But I don?t want to" is how this would appear to browsers that don't have the curly quote quite right.
But wait! There is a solution - kind-of. The character entities
that show up as curly quotation marks:
‘ -- ‘ -- left single quotation mark
’ -- ’ -- right single quotation mark
“ -- “ -- left double quotation mark
” -- ” -- right double quotation mark
(from
HTML symbol reference)
I'll tell you something though - in many browsers, these show up
as `' "". Yep, thats right your normal, every day 7 bit ASCII
quote marks. There isn't anything special about them at all, other than you
have to type out 6 characters to get 1.
To make things worse, some browsers only render the numeric form and
let the symbolic form be displayed as is!
What does this mean to you? Well, if your browser displays things
correctly, very little. However, there are quite a number of us who
run Netscape 4.7 on Linux, and to us this becomes a nightmare.
It isn‘t that bad? Is it? You can still read it all,
can‘t you? After all, Netscape tells us all
“Upgrade Now” and all will be fine. What? Your
machine is too feeble and you can‘t run Netscape 6?
Yes, it is that bad. Are curly quotes that important to you that
not only will you make it difficult for you to maintain, but either
unreadable or unnoticed for a fair chunk of the reading populace?
Please stick with normal quote marks. Thank you.