I like to save local copies of useful text-heavy pages from the web so I can practice improving their appearance by modifying the markup to include CSS.
I've noticed that some text on the pages is often delimited by ` and '.
Is there a good reason for this? I'd like to do my modifications automatically with a script if I thought these quotes were there for a good reason. Is it, for example, a byproduct of a particular authoring tool?
I have tried to search for this, but search engines treat it like empty or incomplete strings and don't give meaningful results.
A single quote example (` ') can be found in Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar:
The problem was this: suppose someone named `joe' on locke sent me mail. If I fetched the mail to snark and then tried to reply to it, my mailer would cheerfully try to ship it to a nonexistent `joe' on snark. Hand-editing reply addresses to tack on `@ccil.org' quickly got to be a serious pain.
The example of Eric Raymond’s essay is a typical example of people from pre-Unicode eras trying to “improve” the typography of their text by using conventions that no longer hold. The quoting style `' is typical of that. It’s also used in LaTeX (which automatically converts it to correct typographical single quotes ‘’).
You can see other ASCII artifacts in Eric’s essay, too: for example, he uses “--” instead of a “correct” dash “–” (an awful lot of people do this, since the dash doesn’t exist on default Windows keyboards).
As such, it’s a relic from a time where support for Unicode fonts (or generally: fonts lacking these typographical features) wasn’t widespread.