Hi
I’ve recently noticed that there are two different apostrophes used in documentation, or at least in Browser Extension documentation. One is the “straight” apostrophe: ' and the other one is the “forward tick”: ’
I assume the straight one should be used, however are there any guidelines on this (for the English language, that is)?
In my experience/opinion, the forward tick tends to be used for typographic purposes rather than any language purpose — e.g. if you are writing quotes in a word processor like Word, and it automatically reformats your quotes to become “smart quotes”.
They can look nicer, but I always tend to steer clear of them in technical documentation, as they can confuse, and also tend to break code examples.
Saying that, maybe we should document this somewhere…
Yeah, we always use straight apostrophes and quotes on MDN as a rule; anyplace you see otherwise is a mistake (usually caused by people writing in an external editor that automatically converts quotes to “curly quotes”).
We should indeed include this in our style guide… and we do, as of a few moments ago.
Sheppy
Cool, thanks sheppy!