Not quotable

Here's something obscure. When you want (inline) quotations on a web page, you type a special bit of text, <q>This is quoted.</q> Your web browser knows what to do with this; perhaps it makes the left quote mark into an open double-quote, for example, and the right mark into a close double-quote. Everything looks pretty.

Unless you browse the web using Internet Explorer. If you are so unlucky, you don't see any quote marks at all. The programmers have known about this bug for years and haven't bothered to fix it. I did not know this before I put up hundreds of pages of short stories up for Linda. I did them all like that, and today I found out that IE users find them hard to read because none of the dialog is quoted.

These kinds of stupid headaches I don't appreciate, and it took me quite a while to work around it.

I've used the quotes on the blog many times. Perhaps you wondered why a seemingly smart person like myself didn't know how to use quotes properly. It's not so much that I am dumb, but because your web browser sucks, and you don't even know it.