Re: Presentation of Q

Chris Lilley wrote:

>> >These seems somewhat like a stylistic problem, since the quotes
>> >really have no meaning themselves and only meant for display. However
>> >CSS would not be able to specify this type of special quotes
>> >rendering.
>>
>> Quotes marks DO have meaning!
>
>No, quote marks by themselves do not reliably indicate meaning, as
>you will see if I describe myself as six feet four inches tall (6'4").
>In plain text, I agree, meaning has to be inferred from quote marks.

*Quote* marks do indicate meaning - very reliably. Inch and foot marks 
(or primes and double primes) don't indicate quoting very well, because 
1. they serve triple duty as typewriter-style quotations, inch and foot 
marks, and lat/lon minutes and seconds; and 2. primes aren't "open" and 
"closed" as are true typographic quotes. Your example uses inch and foot 
marks, but not quotes. 

One problem is that we can't address true quotes with current markup (am 
I right about this?). Mac, Unix, and Windows all use different character 
maps for these characters. Unicode, please, as fast as possible!

Perhaps good quote markup should also automatically substitute French and 
German quoting (for example) when the UA is a French or German version. 


Dan Hale 
dhale@pobox.com
http://www.pobox.com/~dhale/

Received on Monday, 5 May 1997 13:48:06 UTC