Look at this title:
The meaning of a long dash? Ah, no, it's --
, correctly spelled in the title, but mangled in the title, which means that it's mangled in search engine results too. Or look at this one:
Well, it won't work if you use “
and ”
: only ASCII characters such as "
have a special effect. Oh, wait, once again that's just because Stack Exchange mangled the title, so it looks wrong on the site and in search engine results.
This is a technical site. We have a lot of questions about shell quoting and options. Exact punctuation is important.
I raised this a long time ago, and the response from a Stack Exchange developer was
We looked at the quotes on the last several hundred posts. While a few would be more correct without fancy quotes, the vast majority are correct and would be negatively impacted by such a change. Given that, we want to stick with the net-positive of replacing the quotes globally.
Yeah, no, that doesn't make sense. Saying that replacing the quotes is “net-positive” doesn't make it so. It's a cosmetic improvement that can be done manually, versus mangling that affects the meaning and can't be bypassed. Please stop mangling punctuation in titles.