I’ve noticed some posts have been edited to replace proper single quotation marks and apostrophes (‘ and ’) with the typewriter quotation mark ('). In my opinion, this is unambiguously worse. I specifically make an effort to avoid using the more primitive mark. Why is this done? Can we stop doing this?
The single typewriter quotation mark is from the days of typewriters. Basic unicode support is almost ubiquitous, and this is a simple glyph. Do we have data to the contrary?
Some example edits:
I, personally, DESPISE smart/unicode quotes.
Bear in mind when composing questions and answers that not every system is the same as yours - in particular, not every system has full unicode support (I occasionally read Stack Exchange sites in a terminal based web browser, with a terminal font that does not support smart quotes, so they look like this: �).
Rather than risk pasting gibberish into someone's environment I would much prefer to see standard 7-bit-ASCII straight quotes, apostrophes, and backticks (what you get when you type ", ' or ` in the text box with no special treatment) used as those work everywhere, and functionality trumps subjective aesthetics and typographical pedantry.
While I wouldn't go out of my way to remove smart quotes from a post, and would discourage others from doing so just for that purpose (smart quotes alone are not really a substantial issue) if I were editing a post for some other reason I would probably "fix" the quotes at the same time, depending on whether or not they were immediately bothering me.
Along the same lines, I will ask you to please refrain from "edit warring" over which direction quotation marks face. In the grand scheme of a world where SSL is broken and an airliner full of people vanished it's really not that important!
Griping about Unicode is a lost cause. It’s no longer the wave of the future; the future is already here. Back in 2012, Google reported that 60% of the web uses Unicode—a figure that is doubtless higher today.
Complaints about smart quotes are legitimate—in some contexts. Word processors and other publishing software with the smart-quotes feature attempt to infer from the surrounding text whether the user intended, for example, ‘, ’, or plain old ' with a keystroke corresponding to ASCII 39, also known as Unicode APOSTROPHE (U+0027). Frustration happens when software inevitably guesses incorrectly and compounds when the software makes it difficult for the user to enter the intended character.
Stack Exchange has great Unicode support but does not have the (mis)feature of smart quotes. Over on Stack Overflow, if the site silently changed print "Hello world" to print “Hello world”, doing so would ruin helpful advice in many if not most cases. They look the same to human readers but completely different to compilers and interpreters built for programming languages with specific definitions.
When you see curly quotes or other Unicode characters, the user took most likely intended them to appear. Of course, copy-and-paste errors and ”bad typographical taste“ happen, but such cases are exceptional. Further, consider the top Aviation.SE user by reputation at the time of this writing: Peter Kämpf. Yes, he could equivalently render his name as Peter Kaempf, and given the status of English in aviation, a rude insistence from a native speaker that one of our top contributors not even sign his name in the way that’s most natural to him may be understood on some level.
However, this is a global resource for discussing aviation (in English, for reasons familiar to aviators). Insisting on 7-bit ASCII über alles is socially tonedeaf, technologically backward, and produces less pleasing results.
