Has the Internet killed curly quotes?

Major periodicals have fallen prey, including those with a long and continuing print edition. Not long ago, Rolling Stone had straight quotes in its news-item previews, but educated them for features; the “smart” quotes later returned. Fast Company opts generally for all “dumb” quotes online, while the newborn digital publication The Outline recently mixed straight and typographic in the same line of text at its launch. Even the fine publication you’re currently reading has occasionally neglected to crook its pinky.

This baffles Matthew Carter, a type designer whose work spans everything from metal type’s last stand to digital’s first, and whose dozens of typefaces, like Verdana and Georgia, are viewed daily by a billion-odd people. “I have no idea why people don’t use proper quotes. They are always [included] in the font,” Carter says.

This lack of quote sophistication is odd, because the web’s design origins owe a lot to choices Steve Jobs made at Apple and later at his second computer firm, Next. Jobs’s attachment to type famously stems from a calligraphy class taken at Reed College, and he ensured that the first Mac had a mix of bespoke and classic typefaces that included curly quotes and all the other punctuation a designer could want. At Next, he went further, and the web’s father, Tim Berners-Lee, built the first browser and server on a Next.