My understanding is that the conventions for the placement of
punctuation in and around quotations were established by typesetters
and made sense in terms of what symbols held others in place. Maybe
this is a myth  but the editing I have done called for periods and
commas always to go inside the quotation marks, the colons and
semicolons always to go outside and the question marks and
exclamation marks to go inside or out depending on whether they
are part of the quote or the punctuation for the entire sentence.
Emily Wilson-Orzechowski