Fwd: Re: HTML5 review comments

[resent to get it into tracker]
i18n-ISSUE-79: Multilingual q quote rendering

Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:41:45 +0900
From: "Martin J. Dürst" <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
Organization: Aoyama Gakuin University
To: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>
CC: public-i18n-core@w3.org <public-i18n-core@w3.org>

Hello Richard,

On 2011/07/20 23:55, Richard Ishida wrote:

...
> 4.6.7 The q element
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/text-level-semantics.html#the-q-element
>
> The default stylesheet of browsers should render quotes differently
> according to the language of the text. It would be helpful to point this
> out in this section. It would also be helpful to clarify that the
> default stylesheet rendering can be overridden by a user stylesheet. It
> would be nice to have an example that illustrated this.
>
> It would also be useful to provide a few ready-made examples in section
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/rendering.html#punctuation-and-decorations,
> including styles for quotes within quotes, which are also done
> differently in non-English text.
>
> See http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/generate.html#quotes-specify for the CSS
> quotes property, which would be more appropriate for the rendering section.
>
> [I need to consider this last comment more carefully after reading the
> relevant CSS info. I'm leaving here just to remind me to do that.]

The story of <q> is really interesting. I think Francois was the one
proposing it, or at least the one proposing the language-dependent
quotes thing. Semantically, this was the right thing, but for about 15
years, implementations were hopelessly behind, to the extent that I
thought we'd have to give up on the quotes (adding them in the text
wouldn't be that big of a problem; people are used to adding
./;/:/!/?/...). Apparently, lately browsers have finally caught up, and
it looks like this is going to work out.

As for the default stylesheet, it would be great to have lots of
languages specified, but it'll be a lot of work, and no end.

In any case, please make sure that the quotes are added based on the
language outside of the quotation, not the language of the quotation
itself. As an example,

   <p lang='fr'>Il dit <q lang='en'>Hello everybody!</q>.</p>

should be rendered something like

    Il dit «Hello everybody!».

and

  <p lang='en'>He said <q lang='fr'>Bonjour tout le monde!</q>.</p>

should be rendered something like

   He said "Bonjour tout le monde!".

But if you look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English_usage_of_quotation_marks, you
see that's only the start, there's issues with spacing, with multi-line
quotes, and so on.


Regards,    Martin.

Received on Monday, 25 July 2011 07:42:31 UTC