Comments on: Not so Smart Quotes

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 19:10:45 +0000

What? ‘Thingies’ is a perfectly technical term

I actually looked at that page in the spec last night, but completely missed what is was trying to say in the table. I think the approximate rendering of ” as '' sort of threw me off.

At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

By: Raena

Raena — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 13:11:34 +0000

to clarify: the character hex-code spec is ISO 10646. Cause I know I sound sreally intelligent when I refer to stuff as 'thingies.'

Also, the example I gave is for "doubles;" for 'singles,' use 2018 and 2019.

By: Raena

Raena — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 13:07:31 +0000

If you expect to use specific characters, html entities aren’t the way to go: use a hex code as specified in one of those ISO thingies. The table listed here shows you some of the common characters: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/generate.html#quotes

(I know you said you looked at the spec, but this is the piece that refers to same.)

The hex-coded character is enclosed in quotes in a stylesheet, and preceded with a backslash.

So, it’d be:

q:before { content: “201C”; }

q:after { content: “201D”; }

to get typograpically-correct English curlyquotes.