I wasn’t going to say anything when David Winer pointed out on Scripting News that you can use double quotes around words or phrases for Glossary entries, but then Winer posted a second message,
5/15/96: “Some people have objected to the use of double-quotes, saying it interferes with a writer’s process. But I’m a writer, and I love it! I’ve never heard a prose writer complain about this, just script writers. If you quote something that isn’t in the glossary, the renderer leaves it alone. Sometimes it enables text that I wasn’t expecting it to. I usually chuckle, and then put a backslash before the double-quote, which turns rendering off for the term. But often it surprises me by doing exactly the right thing. I laugh even louder when this happens!”
Bottom line: using double quotes for this is stupid. Imagine you have a couple dozen of these things and trying to remember which ones you have to put a backslash in front of and which ones you don’t. Why not just use a different, more rarely used character such as the pipe — | — character, or better yet let individual users choose which character to use.
I can tell you exactly what would happen if my web site were set up to use quote marks for this sort of function. Inevitably one of the people who posts to my site would use quote marks around a word, find it hyperlinked, and have a raging fit about me altering their content. And then I have to explain to them that for certain words they have to put a backslash before the quotes?
No thank you.