tldr; I use
“and”
A few days ago, I found about the <q> HTML tag that
surrounds its contents with “curly” quotes (also knowns as
“smart quotes”). Excited (I can get pretty excited about how
sentences look), I replaced all the “ and
” in the code for this site with the
<q>. It still felt a bit wrong to be (mis) using
<q> for stuff like “airquotes”, but on the
balance it felt like a better choice.
Until today, when I tried to copy paste some text from a page. The quotes were not copied!
This is a deal breaker, and apparently there is no traction
in fixing it. So bye bye <q>.
The alternatives then are:
“ and
”. The advantage of this is that it works across HTML, SGML, and
XML. But I don’t want to remember decimal numeric character references
like it is 1995, and if I have my way, I’ll never have to write another
line of XML ever again (and have never written a single SGML one knowingly).
“, ”. These
should work, but it is not guaranteed.“, ”, ‘,
’ and rely on the browser to guarantee correct rendering.
This is the option I’ve gone with for now.