RE: <q>

So now, you want to tied dozens of other standards to HTML, just to implement... quotation marks around the <q> tag? A group of standards so uncommon, that in the case of one of the most spoken languages on the planet, the printed version is not available from Amazon UK?

And what happens when the document is written from the perspective of an  non-standard dialect? The author loses the ability to safely use <q>?

J.Ja

From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Sam Kuper
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2008 2:19 PM
To: Daniel Glazman
Cc: HTML WG
Subject: 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!

Received on Wednesday, 29 October 2008 18:47:37 UTC