I wonder what is going on with the strange ""double quoting"".

Hi — LWN editor here. We use <q> tags with some CSS to set off quotes from the main text. This _mostly_ works seamlessly, but a few browsers render "<q>something</q>" as ""something"". It's especially common if you copy/paste from the site.

I've considered dropping the outer quotes and using CSS before/after text to add them back in to the rendered page, but we have a huge back-catalog of articles doing it this way, and it's usually not much of an issue.

Thats interesting. I was using Lynx. A quick test with <q>hello</q> gives "hello" as expected. So whatever it is, you must be doing something else. Please dont use CSS to insert characters into normal text, that will fall down if CSS is not supported. I know, in this day and age, that sounds unusual. But abusing CSS to do something it wasnt ment to be doing is still no good idea IMO.

How is using a feature of a language, that is part of the language’s standard, for its intended purpose “abusing” the language to “do something it wasn[’]t me[a]nt to be doing”?