Smart Quotes Aren't So Smart

(This article's title was blatantly stolen from the article quoted here:)

Smart quotes are best left for e-books, physical books in print, PDF documents and any non-HTML related document. If you want to increase the portability of your ezine articles, do the smart thing and turn off Microsoft Word’s smart quotes or do a search/replace before you upload your next article to the web.
Microsoft Word Smart Quotes and Article Marketers Don't Mix

So true, so true.

If I can go one day without seeing one of those “stupid broken quotes’ I'd be overjoyed. Some otherwise very interesting articles become practically unreadable because they're riddled with broken text. I can (sort of) live with the plain old � thingee… but too many of them really make for an agonizing read.

And besides that, if the article is about code, and frickin' code examples are littered with smart quotes… you just turned a simple copy/paste action – the reason the code is there in the first place – into an exercise in patience and futility.

People… it really isn't that hard to prevent this from happening (and in the same breath prevent yourself or your authors) from looking lazy or just plain ignorant.

Spend a second looking at a document before you toss it into that textarea field. Run it through word and do a search and replace. Turn off those gosh-darned smart quotes. The Web is not ready yet for WYSIWYG… not by a longshot. Work with it, and people will be able to actually read (and appreciate) your articles again.

Thank you.