March 16, 2026
Quote Wars: Backticks vs Curly Curls
ASCII and Unicode quotation marks (2007)
The Great Quote Mark War: Curly vs Straight, and Everyone’s Mad
TLDR: The article says don’t use the backtick and apostrophe as opening and closing quotes; use straight quotes or proper curly ones so text looks right. Commenters split between history lessons, complaints about typing curly marks, and programmers raging that “smart quotes” break code — a tiny character causing big headaches.
Tech old-timer Markus Kuhn just dropped a PSA: stop using the backtick (`) and apostrophe (') as “opening” and “closing” quotes. If you’re stuck with old-school typewriter characters, use the straight apostrophe for both sides. If you’ve got modern options, embrace proper curly quotes like ‘ ’ and “ ”. Simple enough… until the comments lit up.
First volley: outrage at the “hideous” backtick style. One commenter calls it an eyesore relic, and the thread nods along, blaming ancient computer fonts for teaching bad habits that still haunt our screens. Then history nerds crash in: one user revives the ‘90s, explaining how Microsoft’s fonts and Word “smart quotes” quietly rewired everyone’s typing — and yeah, it messed with the early web.
Meanwhile, a side quest erupts: “How do I type a proper apostrophe on macOS?” Cue a chorus of arcane keyboard spells, while another poster insists it’s “impossible!” Keyboard enthusiasts veer off to ID a German keyboard like it’s Bigfoot.
The biggest drama? Programmers vs. Pretty Quotes. Language settings that auto-swap '' into “” and ʻʼ make your text look fancy — and your code explode. Devs confess they’ve been burned copying from Word into editors. Verdict from the crowd: backticks belong in code, curly quotes in prose, and everyone’s got scars to prove it.
Key Points
- •Using ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quote with apostrophe (0x27) as right quote produces incorrect appearance on modern systems.
- •If limited to ASCII, use the apostrophe (0x27) for both opening and closing single quotes.
- •In Unicode, use directional quotation marks: U+2018/U+2019 for single and U+201C/U+201D for double quotes.
- •ASCII and ISO 8859 provide neutral quotes and separate accent characters; accents (0x60, 0xB4) should not be used as directional quotes.
- •Historic X Window System fonts depicted 0x60/0x27 as symmetric quote-like glyphs, fostering the incorrect ``quote'' style.