Dartblog

Jeff Harrell has opined on this before, and I’m carving off a bit of his rant territory here, but I thought I might generate a handy graphics interchange file (courtesy of the late, great Compuserve) to remind folks who are apt to use quotations on the internet of proper punctuation. Our world is one of laws and regulations: our land exists under a Constitution, our actions under a code, our work under policy, our studies under standards, and our punctuation under rules. Although in a typographical sense Dartblog has some strides left to make, I recently had a script scour the archives to replace dumb internet punctuation with the proper glpyhs—the type seen in books and magazines. A different version of that script sits on top of the content management system that runs this blog, ready to ablate any errors I might make in writing entries.

The three most prevalent problems with internet quotage is that folks use dumb quotes rather than smart ones, dots rather than ellipses, and one or two dashes instead of an em dash. Here is a visual display and here is a web site that explains the entire ISO Latin 1 character repertoire and what is missing from it but supplied in Unicode. Go forth and punctuate with pomp and propriety.