Re: <q>

2008/10/29 Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>

> Sam Kuper wrote:
>
>> This sounds essentially reasonable to me. How about having HTML 5 specify
>> the default CSS quotes property for every language in RFC 3066 (or,
>> alternatively, should another RFC (or suchlike) be started for the purpose
>> of specifying these), so that HTML 5 can reference it)?
>>
>
> In french, this is defined - and well defined trust me on that please -
> in the famous "Lexique des règles typographiques en usage à l'Imprimerie
> Nationale", ISBN 2743304820 [1].


Great! That makes my suggestion even easier to implement, because the rules
have already been worked out and written down.


> Why would I need a computer-related spec to define what has been living
> in the print world for ages? It's not HTML's task to do that, IMHO.
> It's our national standard body's duty that_already_ has specs for
> printed material to include the unicodes for the chars they're listing,
> period.


The great thing about referencing is that you don't have to duplicate
effort. So in a place where international default presentations of <q> are
to be defined, it could say something along the lines, "For <q> elements in
French, the default presentation follows the rules expressed in ISBN-10:
2743304820." Then it would be up to UA authors to look up those rules and
implement them.

An even better solution, which would require slightly more work up front but
would reduce labour overall would be to task a group with collecting such
standards, translating the relevant parts of them (which are probably quite
short)* into a suitable language (e.g. CSS) with simplifications if needed,
and publish them online. This way, the UA authors and HTML authors would
have it very easy indeed. The HTML 5 spec would just need to either
incorporate the translation directly or reference it.

Thanks for the reference!

Sam

*Cambridge University Library doesn't seem to have a copy of ISBN-10:
2743304820 and neither does Amazon UK (though copies are available through
Amazon.com and .fr), so I have not yet been able to look up the section on
quotations to check its length. If there is an electronic version available,
I'd be glad for a link to it!