Re: Curly Quotes and HTML

Walter Ian Kaye (walter@natural-innovations.com)
Mon, 30 Dec 1996 22:49:03 -0800 

Message-Id: <v0300781aaeee67c0f6f1@[205.149.180.135]>
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 1996 22:49:03 -0800
To: www-html@www10.w3.org
From: Walter Ian Kaye <walter@natural-innovations.com>
Subject: Re: Curly Quotes and HTML

At 2:53p +0000 12/30/96, Andre Mas wrote:
>I have hust written a document on my Mac that uses curly quotes in
>places. When viewed on anything but a Macintosh, I notice that they
>don't appear right.  I have been unable to find anything in the ISO
>ISO 8879 list.  What should I do if I want these curly quotes. Am
>I supposed to use plain quotes and leave it up to the browser to do
>the necessary work?

Well, browsers don't generally convert straight quotes to curly ones, but
my first question is "Do you really need them curly?".

I think I'll chart my mind here:
 ______________________________________________________________________
 Situation                          | Use META w/ | ASCII/  |         |
                                    | x-mac-roman | Latin-1 | Unicode |
 -----------------------------------+-------------+---------+---------|
 Content is Mac-specific, and of no |             |         |         |
 use to any other platform......... |     *       |    *    | future! |
 -----------------------------------+-------------+---------+---------|
 Content is useful to all, but      |             | Convert |         |
 contains curly quotes............. |             | to 7bit | future! |
 -----------------------------------+-------------+---------+---------|

That's just off the top of my head. Hmm... perhaps I'll write up a full page
similar to the above, and link to it from my HTML character set page (which,
btw, is at <http://www.natural-innovations.com/boo/doc-charset.html>).
Guess I'll include a table for math symbol usage, too...


>Also, is there a tag that indicates what character set is being used
>in the document?

Netscape/Mac recognizes:

 <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=x-mac-roman">

but I don't think Netscape/Win or Netscape/Unix recognize that (odd, eh?).

__________________________________________________________________________
    Walter Ian Kaye <boo@best.com>     Programmer - Excel, AppleScript,
          Mountain View, CA                         ProTERM, FoxPro, HTML
 http://www.natural-innovations.com/     Musician - Guitarist, Songwriter