Kottke has many of the same idiosyncratic punctuation habits I do. Note especially how he creates m-dashes and quotation marks: both of his techniques, which I also follow, arise out of typewriter usage.
It occurs to me that those who learned to "print" using typewriters bear the same relationship to traditional printers (who use printing presses) as backyard grillers do to true barbecuers. What I suspect raises the ire of those who prefer, e.g., smart quotation marks, is that nobody uses the typewriter any more. Everyone with a computer now has full traditional print capabilities at his fingertips through programs like Microsoft Word. (To complete the analogy, this is like having a smoker rather than merely a Weber grill.)
Why do Kottke and I continue to "grill" rather than move up to the more sophisticated "barbecuing"? For me it's a matter of wanting my posts to live in the simplest possible native format, ASCII text without Unicode escape codes.
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