The Ineluctable Difficulty of Typographical Politeness
Here we are in the year 2002 (last time I checked) and it’s still extremely difficult to be typographically polite on the web. You may have noticed a few posts recently where I tried to include real quotation marks and apostrophes instead of double-primes and primes (be they sloped or true), like so:
“Here’s the real thing,” he said.
“Yes, but we’re stuck with these,” she replied.
To get correct marks, I have to type an entry in BBEdit with ‘smart quotes’ enabled for the document and then run the translate filter to convert them to HTML entities. This not only adds a step to posting but introduces another problem. If I type a link in such a document, BBEdit isn’t quite smart enough to know that the quotations for attributes inside the tags should not be ‘smart’ and I therefore have to turn of this setting while I type the link.
I’m sorry, but I can’t be bothered. I reluctantly give up.
Here’s my compromise. I’ll try to make sure that quotations are correct. Quotation marks – ““” and “”” – occur infrequently enough that I can usually remember to add them manually. Apostrophes, however, are simply too common to be replaced by “’” each time one is called for. Primes, as wrong as they are, will have to do.
Can we please get this fixed soon…?
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Posted to General Rants • 2002.05.08 (Wed) • 00:23
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