>>5
He seems to imply that this practice exists because of a hack in a certain system (similar to Japanese computers replacing the backslash with a Yen symbol) but this isn't the case. The standard goes back to the original ASCII publication, before the X Window System was even conceived.
Yes, and ASCII changed to Unicode/ISO 8859 in most fonts and now the quotes look ugly as fuck. Things can change. Did you even read the page?