[infogulch]

I agree we all ought to use available punctuation marks correctly. That said, I am compelled to lodge a formal complaint against quoted text arbitrarily assimilating punctuation from its surrounding context.

Quoted text is a sacred verbatim reproduction of its original source. Good authors are very careful to insert [brackets] around words inserted to clarify or add context, and they never miss an oppurtunity (sic) to preserve the source's spelling or grammatical mistakes. And yet quoted text can just suck in a period, comma, or question mark from its quoted context, simply handing the quoting author the key to completely overturn the meaning of a sentence?! Nonsense! Whatever is between the quotes had better be an exact reproduction, save aforementioned exceptions and their explicit annotations. And dash that pathetic “bUt mUH aEstHeTIcS!” argument on the rocks!

“But it's ugly!”, says you.

“Your shallow subjective opinion of the visual appearance of so-called ugly punctuation sequences is irrelevant in the face of the immense opportunity for misbehavior this piffling preference provides perfidious publications.”, says I.

[andersa]

I completely agree, this is perhaps the least sensible part of common English syntax.

   "Hello," he said.  
   "Hello", he said.

Only one of these makes actual sense as a hierarchical grammar, and it's not the commonly accepted one! If enough of us do it correctly perhaps we can change it.

[wvbdmp]

I’ve always wondered about this. I guess typographically they should just occupy the same horizontal space, or at least be kerned closer in such a way as to prevent the ugly holes without cramming.

It’s true, though, that the hierarchically wrong option looks better, IMHO. The whitespace before the comma is intolerable.

This is an interesting case where I am of two autistic hearts, the logical one slowly losing vehemence as I get older and become more accepting of traditions.

[infogulch]

It's especially obvious as a programmer.