ASCII and Unicode quotation marks (2007)

The article warns against using ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark paired with apostrophe (0x27) as a right quotation mark, a practice that originated from old X Window System fonts but renders poorly on modern systems. It explains that ASCII typewriter characters should use 0x27 for both sides, while Unicode offers proper directional quotation marks (U+2018, U+2019, U+201C, U+201D). The piece traces how legacy X font glyphs and early ASCII standards led to widespread misuse of accent characters as quotation marks.