From a Google search:

"Smart quotes are a feature found in many popular word processing
programs. They're smart because they automatically insert open
quotation marks at the beginning of a word and closed quotation marks
at the end. Unfortunately, HTML is not smart enough for smart quotes
since they aren't plain ASCII, so if you have smart quotes in your
code, you'll end up with some strange characters on your Web page. Be
sure to have smart quotes turned off whenever writing HTML code. "

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 01:53:37 +0900, Robert Klemme <bob.news / gmx.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> "Martin DeMello" <martindemello / yahoo.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
> news:SjZxc.723802$oR5.571658 / pd7tw3no...
> 
> 
> > Trying to save myself a bit of tedium - has anyone already written code
> > to replace smart quotes and other such extensions with their normal
> > ascii equivalents?
> 
> What exactly are "smart quotes"?
> 
>     robert
> 
>