Re: is it necessary to disambiguate (using markup) inline notes,citations and original markup? [was] use of <mark> to denote notes in quoted text

On Tue, 10 Sep 2013 11:19:41 +0400, Steve Fenton  
<whatwg@stevefenton.co.uk> wrote:

> On 10 Sep 2013, at 07:59, "Jukka K. Korpela"  
> <jukka.k.korpela@kolumbus.fi> wrote
>
>> 2013-09-10 9:53, Steve Fenton wrote:
>>> I strongly disagree with the idea that the markup,[…] must be  
>>> preserved when quoting text.

Having pondered this a bit longer, I take the same position.

> It is highly unlikely that you would sufficiently change meaning using  
> only markup and in the examples you give, the original markup has no  
> meaning - because of invalid markup, markup that isn't semantic or  
> markup that is stylistic.

I don't know about *highly* unlikely.

It is common for quotations to be partial, and edited (e.g. this email).  
There are various conventions for doing so, from marking elisions, adding  
emphasis, correcting (or not) grammatical errors including those that are  
a result of selective quoting, and annotating the content of the quotation.

[…]

>>>  That is definitely not what is intended by the distortion clause,  
>>> which protects against edits that affect the meaning or against false  
>>> context.
>> Changing <b> to <strong> or vice versa affects, or may affect, the  
>> meaning.
> This example adds semantic meaning in a way likely to match the original  
> intention. Perhaps the original author actually intended emphasis. That  
> wouldn't significantly alter the meaning of the text.

right.

> It is much easier to quote a shorter text, to leave it out of context  
> and widen its interpretation than it is to adjust the intention using  
> markup.
>
> Although semantic use of HTML tags adds meaning, the use of the word  
> "meaning" in this case is vastly different to the use of the word when  
> we talk about the meaning of quoted text.

Indeed.

> I don't think HTML authors in general would accept this constraint of  
> mandatory preservation of HTML when quoting an HTML source.

Nor do I. So the question becomes, "would HTML authors correctly use  
markup to note that they have made changes?".

I think the most relevant markup is actually <ins> and using <del  
style="display:none">. Marking editorial amendments to a quotation this  
way would be reasonable, but I don't recall seeing an example in the wild.  
So while I am quite comfortable with a statement saying that authors *can*  
do this, and even that it isn't a bad idea, in addition to straight  
typographical techniques like *[…]* [sic] [emphasis mine], I'm not about  
to start a major project to crawl our index for <ins>…</ins> or the like.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
       chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Tuesday, 10 September 2013 07:50:01 UTC