RE: Specifications for the HREF in various tags

On Fri, 16 Oct 1998, Luttrell, Mykal wrote:

> Quotation marks are for the norm "double when on the outside" and ' when
> within an area defined by "Double Quotes" thereby alternating the structure
> via the marks

I'm not sure I see what you mean. Are you referring to the use
of various characters for denoting quotations in natural languages?
Then the approach which you describe is one possibility - and it
is not even ubiquous in English. See
http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/latin1/3.html#22
This is not really an HTML question, except as regards to the Q
element which was intended to cause "intelligent", language-dependent
quotation marks to be inserted by browsers. I think we can just forget
the idea. One can simply use the appropriate characters (as soon as
they are supported widely enough, which may take time, but less
time than the implementation of Q would take).

In HTML, there are no nested quotations. It is simplest to use
the quotation mark (the double quote ") throughout. Within attribute
values, sometimes one needs to quote things, probably then using
the apostrophe (as single quote), e.g. in JavaScript, but this is not
an HTML issue - from the HTML viewpoint, such a value is just a string
and only the delimiting quotes are part of HTML syntax.

The price to pay for using always the " quote is that when a string
is to contain a quotation mark, it needs to be presented using
a numeric character reference or an entity reference, i.e.
" or ", instead of using apostrophes as delimiters which
would allow one to use plain " inside. I'd say the price is worth 
paying for the simplicity achieved. 

Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/ or http://yucca.hut.fi/yucca.html

Received on Friday, 16 October 1998 11:54:30 UTC