Curly quotes or apostrophes?

[storax]

If I keep scratching my head I'll go bald, so I thought I'd ask:

For contractions, is it better to use the right single quote ― which looks great ― or the apostrophe ― which is semantically correct: can’t or can't?

I like the idea of using an apostrophe simply because that's what it is, but the curly quote does look better and e-readers are visual devices. Is there any reason to choose the semantic markup over the pretty? The curly quote seems to me a no-brainer, but good websites used to use tables for layout, too.

Do you think curly quotes might cause trouble down the road?

[Jellby]

The right single quote *is* the apostrophe. The one you call apostrophe is just the straight or typewriter apostrophe, don't let the fact that there is an entity called ' fool you, there's nothing semantic about it.

The only problem might happen with fonts that do not support the right single quote, or with searching (if the software is dumb enough).

[storax]

Originally Posted by Jellby

...don't let the fact that there is an entity called ' fool you, there's nothing semantic about it.

Ah... That's exactly what had me going. I didn't think there'd be a problem, but people used to use an uppercase 'O' for a zero, too, and we all know how well that works nowadays.

Thanks for your quick and to-the-point reply!