Re: Presentation of Q

On May 5, 10:35am, Peter Fraterdeus 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.

In marked-up text, that meaning can be reliably and explicitly indicated,
in this case by the Q tag which is for inline quotes and complements the
BLOCKQUOTE tag for block quotes.

> They indicate a change of voice. Such a change must be indicated
> visually in a visual medium, just as they are indicated by a literal
> change of voice in an oral medium.

Precisely. Would you rather that the speech synth said

  quote mark hello quote mark said chis

or changed voice to indicate that there was an inline quotation? By
using Q, it is much easier to indicate this change of voice.


> A Q tag might also be implemented as an indented
> paragraph with no quote marks, depending on the length of the quotation.

Yes, that would be another valid presentational style. A stylesheet
could indicate that all Q elements (or certain specific ones) were to
be presented like this. Converting an inline quote to an indented
paragraph would be much harder if it was merely indicated "like this".


-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Monday, 5 May 1997 12:18:10 UTC