Good questions, wookie, and no simnple anwers, I'm afraid.
Style guides. Pah! I disdain them. (Probably because I've never had one
.)
Yes, I tend to restrict punctuation when using "s to the area within the "s. But this is not, I think, universal. After, sometimes quotations are part of a larger sentence - which case you might well get punctuation that abuts, but does not enter, the realm of the "s. This also leaves one with the dilemma of having a sentence with full stops (periods) within it.
As for commas, I usually avoid them in lists, but if the objects making up the list are themselves long-ish phrases, then it seems to me to make sense to use the comma even before the 'and', so as to ensure there is no confusion about there being two items here (the penultimate and ultimate objects on the list) and not just the one object with a rather long descriptive phrase. Or is this too convoluted? (It's Monday morning and my brain's still too slow to think up an example...)
