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HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

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Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#22
post #9

Speculation, but two causes could be: - Writing in a plaintext editor before copying into HN. - Using a third party HN client that only supports plaintext. For example, I imagine there might be at least a few people out there who might access HN from a terminal client?

A people using iOS with its default “Smart Punctuation” behavior?

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Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#23
post #13
post #9

Speculation, but two causes could be: - Writing in a plaintext editor before copying into HN. - Using a third party HN client that only supports plaintext. For example, I imagine there might be at least a few people out there who might access HN from a terminal client?

> Writing in a plaintext editor before copying into HN Yes, I think it is a thing where people type into Microsoft Word (or similar). Given how moving around the web can cause text in fields to be lost, I don't blame them. But it was a surprising discovery for sure.

Mobile devices is my guess. For example, iOS by default does not use straight ASCII quote, all quotes are "typographically-correct" curly quotes, pretty much in conformance of Apple design-obsessive reputation.

Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#25
post #10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking around, I got the impression they're double rather than single quotes.

That's incorrect. This is a double quote: ", 0x22, ascii This is a smart open quote: “, 0x201c, unicode This is a smart close quote: ”, 0x201d, unicode By default your keyboard double-quote key produces the ascii double quote mark, and that is what's used for quoting in virtually every programming language. Word and many email clients will use smart-quotes by default, but they're pretty rare in programming, hence why…

They’re not smart quotes - they're just open and close quotation marks. What is smart about them?

And I don’t see how one is any “softer” than the other.

People’s programming editors often do paren matching - does that make them smart parens? No they’re still just regular old parens.

Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#26
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking around, I got the impression they're double rather than single quotes.

smart/soft quotes are usually: ‘|’|“|” but there are also other quoting glyphs in ASCII but especially UTF-8

Why are they soft or smart? That makes no sense - they’re just open and close quotation marks.

Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#27
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's incorrect. This is a double quote: ", 0x22, ascii This is a smart open quote: “, 0x201c, unicode This is a smart close quote: ”, 0x201d, unicode By default your keyboard double-quote key produces the ascii double quote mark, and that is what's used for quoting in virtually every programming language. Word and many email clients will use smart-quotes by default, but they're pretty rare in programming, hence why…

They’re not smart quotes - they're just open and close quotation marks. What is smart about them? And I don’t see how one is any “softer” than the other. People’s programming editors often do paren matching - does that make them smart parens? No they’re still just regular old parens.

Why do we call them "hot dogs" when they typically have a very low percentage of dog meat (often 0% I think)? Why do we call it a "gravy boat" when it's not literally a boat? Did you know there are male ladybugs?

Language is descriptive, and people do in fact call them smart quotes. That doesn't mean there has to be anything smart about them, and I'm not making the claim there is, I'm just using an agreed-upon term to convey what I'm talking about.

Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#29
post #18

This has been driving me nuts for decades: "Smart Quotes" first appeared as the name of a feature of interactive document editing tools, wherein the user would always keyboard the "vertical" single or double quote ASCII character, and the software would look at the context of where that quote character was being inserted, and choose the correct "left-quote" or "right-quote" character to actually insert into the docum…

TeX (as a mostly batch formatter) didn't do this, but it did map ASCII quote characters to the typesetting ones. Including mapping a sequence of two single quote or backquote characters to the typeset double quotes.

(FrameMaker was great, BTW. It was what got me into developing fancy layout style sheets and templates, which I later also did with Interleaf, MS Word, LaTeX, and various Web stuff. Somewhere in there, I worked on DynaText and DynaWeb at EBT, so overlapped a bit with Frame as it got into SGML.)

Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

#30
post #13
post #9

Speculation, but two causes could be: - Writing in a plaintext editor before copying into HN. - Using a third party HN client that only supports plaintext. For example, I imagine there might be at least a few people out there who might access HN from a terminal client?

> Writing in a plaintext editor before copying into HN Yes, I think it is a thing where people type into Microsoft Word (or similar). Given how moving around the web can cause text in fields to be lost, I don't blame them. But it was a surprising discovery for sure.

It’s the default substitution done on iOS devices - the OS used on the most widely used smartphone in the US - this is a lot more common among HN users than copying and pasting out of MS Word??
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