Why do text-based technical articles often enclose terms in back ticks and single quotes?

Question

I like to save local copies of useful text pages from the Internet so that I can improve their appearance by changing the layout, including CSS.

I noticed that some texts on pages are often limited to `and 'characters.

Is there a good reason for this? I would like to make my changes automatically using a script if I thought that these quotes were there for a good reason. Is this, for example, a byproduct of a particular authoring tool?

I tried to find this, but search engines consider it as empty or incomplete lines and do not give meaningful results.

An example of a single quote (``) can be found in Eric Raymond Cathedral and Bazaar :

The problem was this: suppose someone named "joe" on locke sent me mail. If I dialed mail in snark and then tried to answer it, my mailman would gladly try to send it to the non-existent "joe" on snark. Manual editing addresses for the link to `@ccil.org 'quickly became a serious pain.

Answer 1

- , "" , , . `'. LaTeX ( ‘’).

ASCII Erics: , "--" "" "–" ( , Windows).

, , Unicode ( : , ), .

Answer 2

HTML . ' " ( , HTML).

, (, , HTML), ",", ", .

Answer 3

(: ) , -. html --- html, html.

Answer 4

:

, - `joe '

- , ASCII.

. ` , , , , , " ". " faux-" .

- , , : " ". ASCII- ( ISO-8859-1), - , , , . ( .)

, " " "" . --, StackOverflow, , - , . ( ... .)

Answer 5

, - , . HTML , , .

Answer 6

HTML4, HTML5 . " html" , " " HTML, XML SGML , , , .

, , . usenet , backtick - ASCII, - . , , .