"Ambidextrous" quotation marks were introduced on typewriters to reduce the number of keys on the keyboard, and were inherited by computer keyboards and character sets. Some computer systems designed in the past had character sets with proper opening and closing quotes. However, the ASCII character set, which has been used on a wide variety of computers since the 1960s, only contained straight single quote and apostrophe (', U+0027) and double quote (" U+0022).
understanding quotes (267
Many systems, like the personal computers of the 1980s and early '90s, actually drew these quotes like curved closing quotes on-screen and in printouts, so text would appear like this (approximately):
never meant to be
These same systems often drew the grave accent (`, U+0060) as an open quote glyph (actually a high-reversed-9 glyph, to preserve some usability as a grave). This gives a proper appearance at the cost of semantic correctness. Nothing similar was available for the double quote, so many people resorted to using two single quotes for double quotes, which would look like the following:
Meant to Be Seen Graphic
-meant-to-be-broken.png\x26quot;
whats meant to be quotes
I Meant What I Said Graphic
understanding quotes (267
Many systems, like the personal computers of the 1980s and early '90s, actually drew these quotes like curved closing quotes on-screen and in printouts, so text would appear like this (approximately):
never meant to be
These same systems often drew the grave accent (`, U+0060) as an open quote glyph (actually a high-reversed-9 glyph, to preserve some usability as a grave). This gives a proper appearance at the cost of semantic correctness. Nothing similar was available for the double quote, so many people resorted to using two single quotes for double quotes, which would look like the following:
Meant to Be Seen Graphic
-meant-to-be-broken.png\x26quot;
whats meant to be quotes
I Meant What I Said Graphic
No comments:
Post a Comment