Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes?

Avatar of Chris Coyier
Chris Coyier on

Glenn Fleishman:

At an increasing number of publications, [curly quotes have] 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.

I know it’s highly uncool in this community to get quotes wrong and highly cool to remind people how to type them. I’m on the uncool side of the fence on this one. I go so far as to standardize on straight quotes on this site. I’m not worried about the encoding, but laziness is some part of it. It’s a weird key command (⌥ [) especially for coders who are so used to straight quotes being required. Not to mention a different key command for the closing version (e.g. ⌥ ⇧ ]), and both are even harder on any non-macOS system). Straight quotes of both varieties have a dedicated key.

You know what is a cool-these-days sentiment? The fact that language evolves, including written language. I’m not anti-curly-quotes, I just don’t care. If you’d like to write in straight quotes, but publish in curly quotes because “algorithmically, it’s a solved problem”, be my guest. Perhaps written English, on the web, has evolved to “whatever, either way”. Oooooo look at that period outside the straight quotes. I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel.

Direct Link →