WordPress and Markdown ‘educate’ the text on this blog, so certain inappropriate characters get transformed after publishing to the right ones. This way you can just use the keys on your keyboard and not trouble yourself with typing in ASCII codes by hand.

You should find a web standards guy to work with and publish the equivalent of Rutter & Boulton’s stuff for the Dutch language. That would be a hit in the Dutch web scene for sure!

By the way – what would you consider to be the de facto styleguides for the Dutch language?

As far as quote marks for the Dutch language are concerned: the correct marks are: ,,Quote”

I was forced to use commas and apostrophes here because the actual marks are unavailable on my US keyboard. Few people (if any) are using these marks anymore, presumably because of this reason.

So we just use the English marks. We should use them in the way Rutter and Boulton point out in the PDF.

While we’re at it: in Dutch use single quote marks (apostrophes) for quotes within quotes, and to indicate that a specific word has a special status.