For the Streetsblog WordPress theme, we wanted to include a widget which would display a featured user comment. The comp had spiffy oversized quotes surrounding the featured text.

I’d seen http://24ways.org/2005/swooshy-curly-quotes-without-images a while back, and decided to improve upon it for the new Streetsblog site. In particular, the floated close quotes in Simon Willison’s approach will often leave a lot of whitespace.