In which I am a bitter old fandom fart.

[pauraque_bk]

[Poll #524089]

Comments

[wootsauce.livejournal.com]

Your answer-composing machinations have made me sound totally grumpy!
I actually had to explain to someone why her smart quotes were messing up HTML the other day... hadn't really thought about it for a while.

[prillalar]

What's the context? Because curly quotes in email are bad and I despise them, but curly quotes in HTML are fine, if they're properly encoded or you're using the right content-type, and those I enjoy non-perversely, even if I don't make a huge effort to use them myself.

OK, that was way too geeky. Sorry.

[pauraque]

I actually wince whenever I see them, regardless of whether the person has used them in a reasonable fashion. Too many bad associations.

[woolf.livejournal.com]

OH. Is that what smart quotes are, the curly ones that screw everything up?

I take my answer back. I hate those things.

[pauraque]

You can take your answer back thuswise.

[g_shadowslayer]

May be fine in HTML, until you copy that text and paste it into a .txt document, and then it dumps everything at the point the first one shows up. AAAAARGH!!!

[pauraque]

Amen, sister!

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Curly quotes in HTML are frequently not properly encoded, and show up as ? all over the page, so I am with the SMART QUOTES BAD EXCEPT FOR OSCAR WILDE'S camp.

(Hee, Oscar Wilde's camp. He certainly was.)

and just to sound like a clueless moron...

[g_shadowslayer]

...what is l337 speak, anyway? I mean, I know what it is, sorta, but what is it?

[forked.livejournal.com]

Dude?!?! People are annoyed by the ticky box? Blasphemy!

My world. It tilts.

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

what are smart quotes?

[lycoris.livejournal.com]

I think they are curly speech marks but I'm not sure - I second a clarification before I make any sort of answer. :)

[gmth.livejournal.com]

I thank you, brother, for pointing out the pain-in-the-ass-ness that is the "OMG TICKY BOX!" phenomenon. Gah. It stopped being funny about 0.0002 seconds after the first time someone did it.

[thistlefinch.livejournal.com]

I've been advocating killing the ticky box thing ever since it showed up. What's the point of the random ticky box? It drives me batty.

[ladysorka]

Smart quotes are the work of the devil.

I've actually gone into Word and turned the bloody things off completely.

[leni-jess.livejournal.com]

You mean there's a way to turn them off for good? *bounces excitedly* I have to do it every damn day. But then I only have Word97 - *droops*.

[cschick.livejournal.com]

It's easier to show than explain:

http://fluky.gossamer.org/local/msword97.html

[leni-jess.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for linking to that tutorial! I don't want to apply all the changes there, but I should be able to get the ones I want permanent now. I'd failed to realise that I needed to follow up in Autoformatting. Whee!

[godlessharlot.livejournal.com]

Re. the ticky box: that wasn't even funny back when it was supposed to be funny. A bit like the !!!11eleventyone thing. That got old really fast.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

I feel like such a noob. I took this poll while thinking "smart quotes? He can't possibly mean that stupid piece of Word evilness, can he? It must be something fannish I just don't know about! Woe!" But no, you meant exactly that.

also I still like ticky boxes.

[aithopa.livejournal.com]

That was my exact reaction!

I finally smote the evilness of smart quotes by turning them off just the other day. Hurrah for the one time the evil paperclip has ever been useful.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_hannelore/]

Why are they called "smart" "quotes" if they're used by n00bs? :P


*fans the drop-down love*

[scarah2.livejournal.com]

BLAH

And now everything's going to UTF-8 and it renders all of the smart quotes into some weird looking crap. And it's not just the quotes, what the hell is wrong with you know, three dots, or a normal hyphen? Arggh.