Old style quotation [Was:Re: cvs commit: www/en/platforms amd64.sgml]

[Ben Kaduk]

On 12/12/07, Tom Rhodes <trhodes at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 08 Dec 2007 13:57:24 +0100
> Gabor Kovesdan <gabor at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> > Chin-San Huang escribió:
> > > chinsan     2007-12-08 12:13:26 UTC
> > >
> > >   FreeBSD doc repository
> > >
> > >   Modified files:
> > >     en/platforms         amd64.sgml
> > >   Log:
> > >   - Revert the correct American English style.
> > >     ( ``Hammer''. -> ``Hammer.'' )
> > >
> > This change made me remember of a thing that I've wanted to discuss. As
> > a tradition, we use `` and '' character pairs to quote text. This seems
> > to be strange for people that don't know this tradition and there's no
> > technical reason to go on doing this, we can just use " ", which seems
> > to be better formatted according to the current style conventions used
> > on the web. Is there any objection against that I change them to normal
> > quotation marks? We already use those in the Hungarian and Spanish web
> > translations without any problems and the text in the <quote> element in
> > DocBook also have normal quotation marks in the generated output.
>
> I asked this very question a long time ago, something with layout
> in the ISO key set (I think).  You can search the archives, it was
> about or around 5 years ago (again, I think).
>

I saw this fairly recently elsewhere -- apparently it is in
some *roff spec that `` and '' should always render as
nice, paired quotes.  This didn't actually happen for
a long time since that's basically the best that ASCII can
do; however, Unicode makes it possible.  Just using
" would, by that spec, produce broken output.
It is, however, questionable if this is relevant anymore.

-Ben Kaduk