- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
- Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 10:50:46 +1000 (AEST)
- To: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Regarding quotations:
In the English braille code (and probably others as well), the opening and
closing single quotation, opening and closing double quotation and
apostrophe characters are represented by distinct braille signs, as in
typeset print. It is therefore necessary to be able to distinguish between
these characters when processing a document. The " character entity
in HTML is mapped to the double quotation mark. However, single quotation
marks present more of a problem, especially if the apostrophe is used to
represent them. There exist possessive forms in English in which the
apostrophe appears at the end of a word. Likewise, there are words which
appear most often in poetry ('tis, 'twas etc.), where the apostrophe
occurs at the start of the word. Some of these cases could be readily
caught by pattern matching rules, but not all are susceptible to such
treatment.
The Q element clearly overcomes this problem. Having an apostrophe in
place of a quotation mark, on a quotation mark where an apostrophe should
appear, creates ambiguities which are just as serious, if not more so,
than the case in which Q and " are used together, resulting in two
quotation marks on screen or in printed output.
Is there a backward-compatible way in which to preserve the distinction
between apostrophe and single quotation marks, or, given this problem and
its consequences for braille production, should we leave checkpoint 3.6 as
it stands?
Received on Wednesday, 14 July 1999 20:50:51 UTC