Re: proper coding or use for mdash

Hmm. An alternative would be to mark these as blockquoutes (since they seem
to be a paragraph each, and have a style rule like the following:

blockquote.mdash:before { content: "--" ; margin: 0 }

(or something like that)

so for things marked

<blockquote class="mdash">blah blah blah</blockquote>
<blockquote class="mdash">foo bar thing</blockquote>

you get the right presentation, or just blocks (the common english language
approach, but obviously wrong for portuguese).

I am not sure  of the internationalisation aspect of that - I don't recall if
it is possible to apply per-language styles although I believe it is (maybe
just wishful thinking).

cheers

Chaals


On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, clorisval pereira jr. wrote:

  Hi. Thanks for your reply,

  I'll stick to the specification, but I'll probably sleep
  over this problem since the best solution seems to be
  far from reach, still.

  Nestcape6 and Lynx2.8 render the q element using delimiting
  quotation marks for 3 languages (en, fr, pt) I had tested.

  Netscape4.x and IE5.5 don't render any punctuation marks
  for the q element.

  I have also tested one brazilian freeware speech synthetizer
  but it doesn't render any difference for the quotations.
  Neither for the q element, nor the blockquote element.

  I am working with a public library and we are converting
  a few public domain books, already in digital format, from
  MS.doc and .rtf to HTML.

  Since I am working with old literature books, I did not wanted
  to change the original style. For example, change the mdash
  for quotations in favor of the quotation marks (american english
  style).

  I even thought about using something like:
  <p>&mdash,<q>I had a great time in Venice</q></p>
  So I could retain the original mdash and use the proper quotation
  markup. But I've found some agents doesn't render de &mdash;
  entity properly, since it is not ISOlatin1.

  I guess I'll have to run a few more tests.

  best regards,
  --
  clorisval pereira jr.  cjunior@rnp.br


  On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

  > Well, according to the specification each speaker should be marked with a q
  > element...
  >
  > <p><q>I had a good time in lisbon</q></p>
  > <p><q>but I thought you were in Venice</q></p>
  > <p><q>Oh, yes, silly me. I meant to say venice dear</q></p>
  >
  > This is supposed to generate the proper punctuation according to language /
  > locality, but I don't know how smart browsers are about it.
  >
  > Chaals
  >
  > On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, clorisval pereira jr. wrote:
  >
  >   In some portuguese language literature books, the mdash is often
  >   used to indicate changes between characters in a dialogue.
  >
  >   for example:
  >
  >   John and Mary were talking about their vacation.
  >   -- I had a great time in venice.
  >   -- Did you see many historical places?
  >   -- No, I had spent most of time from one restaurant to another.
  >
  >   I would like to know what should be the proper way to markup
  >   dialogues like this, using accessible HTML, without changing the
  >   original text. Does using the entity &mdash; alone suggests it
  >   is a dialogue?
  >
  >   I would appreciate your thoughts or comments.
  >
  >   best regards,
  >   --
  >   clorisval pereira jr.  cjunior@rnp.br
  >
  >
  > --
  > Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
  > W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI  fax: +33 4 92 38 78 22
  > Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
  > (or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)
  >


-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI  fax: +33 4 92 38 78 22
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Tuesday, 12 March 2002 05:44:53 UTC