CT3
Is it safe to use smart quotes in HTML email?
Hello! Years ago when I worked at a different company, I always had to change smart (“curly”) quotes and apostrophes to straight quotes so they would render correctly on all mail clients. My current company uses SFMC (ExactTarget) Content Builder to build emails, and I've never see any rendering issues for smart quotes in my Litmus tests. Is it safe to use both varations of quotes? This topic is surpisingly hard to find best practices for online, so thanks in advance!
YES! It helps to specify utf-8 in the charset etc, but generally smart quotes (and other typography niceties) should be good to use. If you find they're not supported anywhere, it might help to use the entity codes too (“ & ”).
Edge case - some web fonts might not have some of the more obscure characters, but most common ones will do
thanks for confirming!
Hi Carolyn,
Let us not mix two things here, the smart quotes used in the email body & smart quotes used in the preheader. For the email body part, smart quotes can render all good if we use their ascii equivalents (they are different than the character entity and have much broader support). For smart quotes used in the preheader area, do not use any special characters as it would not have universal support in emails (this has been tried & tested using many ESP's).
Please refer this link:
https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/quotes-in-html.html
Thanks
Kevin
As Elliot said, smart quotes are definitely safe to use. I usually make sure I use the HTML entity equivalents in the code:
= &“and”for smart quotesHere's a great resource on HTML entities for popular punctuation - https://www.toptal.com/designers/htmlarrows/punctuation/
thanks Jaina!
Is it safe to use smart quotes and apostrophes in preheaders or preview text? At one point, these seemed to cause issues.
Also a good question. I avoid them just to be safe, but I'd love to know if that's unnecessarily cautious.
I double up to be cautious... The preheader inside of the code will have entity codes for smart quotes and apostrophes, and the preheader in the text version of the email will just have the appropriate characters.
I encountered some rendering issues with the preheader last year, where apostrophes, smart quotes, hyphens and ampersands weren't rendering on iphones when converted to entity codes, but rendering fine everywhere else. Conversely, when I reverted to the characters, rather than the entity codes, iphones displayed with no problem, but I ran into rendering issues on android devices. After some testing, I came to the conclusion that iphone devices pulled preheader text from the text version of the email, if it was available. So now, I just make sure the preheader with entity codes is in the email code, and the text version is entity-code free, and no more problems :)
Interesting that smart quotes supported across the board now. I've reached the point where smart quotes look wrong to me everywhere and I'm always changing them to plain text. I wonder if that habit will be as tough to break as the whole two-spaces-after-a-period habit?
emailology.org is your best buddy. Use the character conversion tool.
Please please please stop the use of prime / foot and double prime / inch marks. Quotation marks and apostrophes are not nice to have. They are imperative, and have a significant impact on readability. As previously stated, yes, they work everywhere. entities are always an option (always have been) if you encounter some edge case.