- From: Bruce Bailey <bbailey@clark.net>
- Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 11:07:35 -0500
- To: "WAI IG" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Dear Gurus, I opened myself up for criticism when I last asked the group about typographic effects -- namely getting a double space after a period that ends a sentence -- but I am eager to address another one of my pet peeves... Please respond on or off the list as your conscious dictates. What is the preferred way to get fancy quotation marks? I am talking about the ones usually used with modern word processor where the left double quote mark looks like a tiny 66 and the right like 99. Some word processors refer to this as "smart quotes". I have not tested rigorously, and have not tried the most current flavors of Netscape Navigator (NN) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE). Lynx 2.8, by the way, handles all of these approaches fine (well, except for the last one, which is my least favorite). My testing was limited to a few different PCs and versions of NN and IE (the same ones I use to check other code I write). My observations so far for a few techniques: <Q> ... </Q> is the preferred HTML 4.0 code, but is not supported by either NN or IE! <&LDQUO;> ... <&RDQUO;> would be my second choice, but this technique does not seem to work with earlier versions of graphical browsers. <“> ... <”> works everywhere I have tried (including Macintosh platforms). <“> ... <”> avoids the supposedly unsupported characters in the range <€> thru <Ÿ> but does not work everywhere I tried! `` ... '' is a technique I have seen on many pages. This will always display, but the single apostrophe is itself a problem. It is frequently neutered, so it too is unattractive. Monospaced fonts, text applications (including Lynx), and screen readers will all expose this kludge. Who knows what AI agents (search engines, spiders, crawlers, etc.) make of such constructs (probably they just ignore it)! FrontPage/Word/WordPerfect and the like would have you cut and paste the character directly into the code they generate. This, of course, works only on graphical Windows browsers, and results in invalid HTML. My main questions are as follows: Which of the above techniques is going to be the most compatible? Do screen readers have problems with any of the above techniques? What are the hazards of using <’> and the like? Is the implementation for this technique really better supported than the others or was I just too lax in my testing? Conversely, would you argue that I should just settle for the usual <"> ... <"> construct (which works everywhere, but is universally unattractive)? And some other related HTML trivia that does not belong on this list, but I have been most unsuccessful finding the answer elsewhere: What can one do for a Macintosh computer so that browsers render certain HTML special characters -- like <&SUP2;> and <&FRAC12;> -- correctly? I just upgraded to NN 4.51 and this problem is still not addressed! Thank you for your time. Bruce Bailey, DORS Webmaster http://www.dors.state.md.us/
Received on Monday, 22 March 1999 11:13:23 UTC