[DHowett]

Equally baffling is that quotes, which should simply demarcate regions within which special characters are ignored, have special semantic meaning to a CSS parser.

That narrative, however, isn't one for which we can blame Microsoft.

[icebraining]

I don't agree, one is a string, the other is a symbol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_(programming)

[pritambaral]

They don't have special semantic meaning to CSS the spec. Quotes are needed[0] only if the <family-name> value has whitespace in it.

0: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/font-family#Va...

[icebraining]

They have special meaning since "generic family names (...) must not be quoted".