Re: <q> -- <q><q></q></q> <blockquote> and thought balloons

2008/10/30 Dailey, David P. <david.dailey@sru.edu>

>  If C quotes a previous statement by A who was quoting a putative future
> thought by B where the time of the thought by B is, in fact, earlier than
> the ostensible reading of C's statement, then certain languages like Navajo
> (with its incredibly complex sense of aspect) might be expected to
> encapsulate it all in a most eloquent set of grammatical devices. Should our
> theories of punctuation not be extended to handle temporal, probabilistic
> and epistemic aspects of verbs?
>
Assuming that "we" means the HTML 5 WG, then the answer probably ought to be
"no". As far as the <q> element is concerned, I don't think HTML 5 ought to
possess any "theory of punctuation" that extends beyond defining, for
authors, that <q> represents a quotation, and specifying that UAs ought
where possible to implement a (fairly limited) default, user-overridable set
of styles (say, one for each language in ISO 639-1 plus rules for
encapsulating foreign languages) for rendering <q> elements.

What those styles should be, I don't know in advance, but I think it's
*very* unlikely they ought to be extended to handle temporal, probabilistic
and epistemic aspects of verbs, not least because these are properties I do
not believe the <q> element can express.

> Suppose an utterance is expressed in a base language, let's call it
> Punctuation ML, for which the primitives of the ML are necessary and
> sufficient for the punctuation of human thought (hence, a language more
> basic than HTML). Then to what extent might we hope for our PML to be
> transformable into either HTML or SVG (through, say, XSLT) as appropriate?
>
This would be easier to determine if such a language as PML existed, but
since it does not (and, I would argue, is unlikely to as long as "sufficient
for the punctuation of human thought" remains a contested concept). Since if
does not, this is not a concrete use case, and as such, is out of scope for
the HTML5 WG, in my opinion.

Contextually, [...] it may not be a practical consideration.
>
I don't believe it is a practical consideration, not least because the HTML
WG doesn't not have a time-machine as its disposal!

Regards,

Sam