Dumb quotes are punctuation marks that look the same whether they are opening or closing a quotation. They are straight quotation marks that resembled teardrops. Smart quotes that open a quotation or title appear as solid “66”’s, while closing smart quotes look like “99”’s.

When the typewriter was still prevalent, straight quotes helped reduce the number of keys on the keyboard, and the computer keyboard followed suit. However, many prefer the look of smart quotes in printed text. Microsoft Word incorporated smart quotes by using a built-in function to automatically replace dumb quotes sent from the keyboard. The software can determine whether the instance calls for opening smart quotes or closing smart quotes.

Smart quotes interjected with software created problems for markup languages used on the World Wide Web. The ASCII character set that formed the foundation for cross-platform compatibility did not include smart quotes, so the editors used to build Web pages did not understand the symbols and would display ‘garbage’ instead. The newer Unicode character set includes smart quote support, so this creates a problem less often. However, many older character sets that do not support smart quotes are still in use.

To solve the problem, extended expressions of smart quotes are sometimes used in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to make sure smart quotes translate correctly. This is also the case for Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). The long expressions are as follows:

Using long expressions will ensure that your smart quotes reproduce on a webpage in true form. They should also ensure cross-platform compatibility between applications or language editors. Smart quotes are also referred to as book quotes. While many prefer smart quotes, others believe these little punctuation marks are more trouble than they are worth and should be eliminated.