> It may well be that future historians of literature will see in it a revival of the great tradition of personal letters as art.<p>Ah what might have been ...
As far as I remember, the distinction between "typesetter" quotation and "logical" quotation appears in computerized typesetting. In traditional paper typesetting, a quote was kerned together with a period (or a comma) into a single character, so that quote is above, not before or after the period.
I recently watched David Foster Wallace on Charlie Rose, and given his history in semantic research, and I would equate his style with these ideas. I don't know if this concept of a hacker writing style is a new phenomenon, but more a bi-product of mathematical aspects of language understanding.
It's also getting quite common so see just:<p>/flame<p>I can only imagine that's coming from the html-style metadata they are showing in these exactly, but made a lot easier to type for non-hackers. I rather like it myself, even.