Re: <q>

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 2:10 PM, Sam Kuper wrote:
> 2008/10/28 Olivier GENDRIN
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 1:17 AM, Ben Boyle wrote:
>> > Got a question ...
>> > <p lang="en"><q lang="fr">Bonjour</q> he said.</p>
>> > English or French quotation marks?
>>
>> Interesting use case. As far as the sentence is intended to be read by
>> English speaking people, I think that they await for English
>> typography marks, so English quotation marks would make sense. But If
>> we had more nested quotations (French quoted into French quoted into
>> English), the nested quotation would need French ones (in fact, it
>> would need the quotation marks used into the outer quoted sentence).
>>
>> I think that quotation marks are not part of the quotation, but
>> outside of it (:before and :after), so the @lang of the quotation mark
>> is the @lang of the surrounding tag.
>
> According to the Chicago Manual of Style (Thirteenth Edition is the one I
> have to hand):
>
> 9.8 Note too that the remarks [elsewhere in the chapter] apply to foreign
> punctuation in a foreign language context, that is, in an article or book in
> that language. A bit of foreign language dialogue or a longer passage quoted
> in a foreign language introduced into an English context would be punctuated
> in English fashion, especially with regard to quotation marks:
>
> "L'état," said the Sun King modestly, "c'est moi."
>
> So Olivier is essentially correct, at least in the case of a foreign
> language being quoted in written English under CMS rules. It is possible
> that other style guides would differ for English, and that other languages
> might have different conventions altogether.

See also: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/selector.html#lang which has an
example of how a CSS stylesheet would look like for German and French
(it is implied that q::before and q::after have their 'content'
property set to open-quote and close-quote respectively)


-- 
Thomas Broyer

Received on Tuesday, 28 October 2008 13:27:55 UTC