Re: proper coding or use for mdash

Hello Chaals,

The blockquote alternative seems to fit better for may case.
Although I am having some trouble with the content atribute.
This is CSS2, am I wrong?

I guess I will start using the follwing approach, (that seems
to be more stable)

blockquote.mdash { margin-left:0 }

<blockquote class="mdash">&#8212; I had a great time in Venice</blockquote>
<blockquote class="mdash">&#8212; I thought you had traveled to France</blockquote>

I will be running more tests with another screen reader
that is used by a large percentage of my target audience
and I will see if I can validate or not the mdash entity.

Thanks for your help,
--
clorisval pereira jr.  cjunior@rnp.br


On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

> 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 16:34:29 UTC