Silly quotes are straight quotes that look like tears and are used to reduce keystrokes. Smart quotes are preferred in printed text and can cause problems in markup languages. Extended expressions can ensure correct rendering of smart quotes on web pages for cross-platform compatibility. Some prefer to do away with them.
Silly quotes are punctuation marks that look the same whether they’re opening or closing a quote. They are straight quotes that looked like tears. Smart quotes that open a quote or title appear as a full ’66’, while closing quotes appear as ’99’.
When the typewriter was still prevalent, straight quotes helped reduce the number of keystrokes on the keyboard, and the computer keyboard followed suit. However, many prefer the look of smart quotes in printed text. Microsoft Word has incorporated this by using a built-in feature to automatically replace silly quotes sent from the keyboard. The software can determine if the instance requires opening or closing quotes.
Smart quotes interspersed with software created problems for markup languages used on the World Wide Web. The ASCII character set that formed the basis for cross-platform compatibility did not include quotes, so the editors used to create web pages did not they understood the symbols and instead displayed them incorrectly. The new Unicode character set includes support for smart quotes, so this creates a problem less often. However, many older character sets that don’t support quotes are still in use.
To resolve the issue, extended expressions of quotes in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) are sometimes used to ensure that the marks translate correctly. This is also the case for Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Long expressions are as follows:
HTML
Opening smart double quotes
&ldquo
Closing with smart double quotes
&rdquo
Left single smart quote
&lsquo
Right Single Smart Quote
&rsquo
Clever quote apostrophe
&sbquo
XML e SGML
Opening smart double quotes
& # 8220
Closing with smart double quotes
& # 8221
Single opening smart quote
& # 8216
Intelligent single closing estimate
& # 8217
Using long expressions will ensure that smart quotes are rendered on a web page in correct form. They should also ensure cross-platform compatibility between applications or language editors. These marks are also referred to as book citations. While many prefer the way they look, others believe these little punctuation marks are more trouble than they’re worth and should be done away with.
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