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I like to save local copies of useful text-heavy pages from the web so I can practice improving their appearance by modifying the markup to include CSS.

I've noticed that some text on the pages is often delimited by ` and '.

Is there a good reason for this? I'd like to do my modifications automatically with a script if I thought these quotes were there for a good reason. Is it, for example, a byproduct of a particular authoring tool?

I have tried to search for this, but search engines treat it like empty or incomplete strings and don't give meaningful results.

A single quote example (` ') can be found in Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar:

The problem was this: suppose someone named `joe' on locke sent me mail. If I fetched the mail to snark and then tried to reply to it, my mailer would cheerfully try to ship it to a nonexistent `joe' on snark. Hand-editing reply addresses to tack on `@ccil.org' quickly got to be a serious pain.

Lightness Races in Orbit
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pavium
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    Hm, can you post a link to a sample page that shows this behavior? – Tomalak Sep 16 '09 at 13:33
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    This sounds unlikely. To rule out that it's something funny with your download and/or editor, you can use "view source" directly in the browser to make sure. And if you could then add a few links to such sites to your question, that would be helpful. – unwind Sep 16 '09 at 13:34
  • I've edited the question to add a link. – pavium Sep 16 '09 at 13:44
  • The backtick and single quote around `joe' are visible with view source in the 5th paragraph of the linked page. – pavium Sep 16 '09 at 13:55
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    The example you give isn't HTML, it's text that happens to be available on an HTML page. See Dave Hinton's reply below for an explanation. – NickFitz Sep 16 '09 at 14:05

6 Answers6

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The example of Eric Raymond’s essay is a typical example of people from pre-Unicode eras trying to “improve” the typography of their text by using conventions that no longer hold. The quoting style `' is typical of that. It’s also used in LaTeX (which automatically converts it to correct typographical single quotes ‘’).

You can see other ASCII artifacts in Eric’s essay, too: for example, he uses “--” instead of a “correct” dash “–” (an awful lot of people do this, since the dash doesn’t exist on default Windows keyboards).

As such, it’s a relic from a time where support for Unicode fonts (or generally: fonts lacking these typographical features) wasn’t widespread.

user3840170
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Konrad Rudolph
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  • It's true, the pages I've seen this in would tend to be the older ones, or derived from older texts. – pavium Sep 16 '09 at 14:10
  • It's my favourite answer so far ... but it's late here. I'll come back to it in the morning. – pavium Sep 16 '09 at 14:18
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    This answer is exactly correct. A thorough and informative discussion of the usage of the "backtick|single quote|grave accent" can be found here, http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html. Specifically, the `' usage is likely due to the early X Windows System fonts, which rendered the glyphs as symmetric single "smart" quotes. (So, an author would be inclined to use it in any text which would [likely] be read on an X Windows System.) – Richard Michael Jun 22 '15 at 14:44
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    The CatB essay was last edited in 2000, so it probably wasn’t an anachronism to use an ASCII backtick and apostrophe when it was published. It was simply never updated to use modern typography. – user3840170 Aug 18 '23 at 07:51
  • @user3840170 Yeah, thanks for the correction. That’s exactly what I meant (to the point that I was going to argue and point out that I had written “relic”, not “anachronism”, until I noticed that you had changed that). (Out of curiousity: was this question/answer linked somewhere? Since yesterday there has been repeated activity here.) – Konrad Rudolph Aug 18 '23 at 08:00
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This:

suppose someone named `joe'

is a visual affectation for smart quotes that works in ASCII-only environments.

I personally wouldn't recommend it at all. ` is not an open-quote, it's a grave accent, and the resulting lop-sided look of the quotes is, to my tastes, worse than just using 'straight quotes'. ``Double faux-quotes" are even uglier.

You'll find some Germans type faux-smart-quotes using both the grave and acute accent characters: `like this´. This is not ASCII-compatible (it uses an ISO-8859-1 extended character) and it's still quite ugly, but they do it because the accent characters are present on the German keyboard layout, making them easy to type. (And they don't know any better.)

Really we should have proper ‘smart quotes’ available “on the keyboard” for «direct» typing. That would solve these problems and banish bogus auto-smart-quote features — including the silly StackOverflow feature that messed up your question title — back to the bitbucket where they belong. (Though actually... I already have.)

bobince
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  • I think they're ugly too. That's why I try to get rid of them, and I'm wondering who uses them in the first place, and why? – pavium Sep 16 '09 at 14:04
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    People who wanted to do smart quotes way back before there was a reliable way of rendering smart quotes. And idiots, of course. Never underestimate the power of idiots. – bobince Sep 16 '09 at 14:07
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    I think there is a severe dissociation of online publishing and desktop publishing. While I appreciate typographically correct quotes in printed documents (and hence, in word processors), I find them more than annoying when they are used online. I have a feeling that people try to be smart or simply just "different" by using them, and like apostrophes, the vast majority just gets it horribly wrong. – Tomalak Sep 16 '09 at 15:01
  • @Tomalak Nothing to do with trying to be smart or different. LaTeX users for example *have* to quote this way for their quotes to be rendered correctly. If you write a lot in LaTeX, it becomes the normal and correct thing to. Today we're all used to Markdown, and will use Markdown formatting marks even when it's not a Markdown document. 20 years ago a lot of computer-minded scientists were used to LaTeX, and would use LaTeX formatting marks even when it wasn't a LaTeX document. – Cris Luengo Aug 18 '23 at 19:45
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HTML doesn't. Only ' and " characters may be used to delimit attribute values (which are the only strings that can be delimited in HTML).

People writing text (which happens to be marked up with HTML) may use “,”,‘ and ’, but that is just writing using quote marks.

Quentin
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This style of quote marks has been an (note: not the only) accepted style of quoting in plain text files since before the web. This is nothing to do with html specifically --- it is acceptable in html text files, but predates html.

dave4420
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Neither HTML4 nor HTML5 allow curly quotes as attribute value delimiters in the markup. Searching for "curly quotes html" in search engines throws up a few pages, the first of which Curling Quotes in HTML, XML and SGML describes some tools to remove erroneous quotes, which is the opposite of what you ask for but the right thing to do with such files.

Your comment indicates that you mean having backtick and quote in the text, rather than in the markup. This was a fairly common style on usenet back in the day, as backtick is ASCII but curly quotes aren't. To insert a backtick into your text, press the backtick key on your keyboard when typing it in.

Pete Kirkham
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  • Sorry about the curly quotes in the title of the question. They were added by SO's software. I'm not complaining about curly quotes (although someone should) – pavium Sep 16 '09 at 13:45
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I think this is an artifact of your editor -- perhaps you have smart quotes turned on. Strings in HTML are delimited by either a pair of single- or double-quotes, not smart quote characters.

tvanfosson
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