Re: proper coding or use for mdash

Hi. Thanks for your reply,

I'll stick to the specification, but I'll probably sleep
over this problem since the best solution seems to be
far from reach, still.

Nestcape6 and Lynx2.8 render the q element using delimiting
quotation marks for 3 languages (en, fr, pt) I had tested.

Netscape4.x and IE5.5 don't render any punctuation marks
for the q element.

I have also tested one brazilian freeware speech synthetizer
but it doesn't render any difference for the quotations.
Neither for the q element, nor the blockquote element.

I am working with a public library and we are converting
a few public domain books, already in digital format, from
MS.doc and .rtf to HTML.

Since I am working with old literature books, I did not wanted
to change the original style. For example, change the mdash
for quotations in favor of the quotation marks (american english
style).

I even thought about using something like:
<p>&mdash,<q>I had a great time in Venice</q></p>
So I could retain the original mdash and use the proper quotation
markup. But I've found some agents doesn't render de &mdash;
entity properly, since it is not ISOlatin1.

I guess I'll have to run a few more tests.

best regards,
--
clorisval pereira jr.  cjunior@rnp.br


On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

> Well, according to the specification each speaker should be marked with a q
> element...
>
> <p><q>I had a good time in lisbon</q></p>
> <p><q>but I thought you were in Venice</q></p>
> <p><q>Oh, yes, silly me. I meant to say venice dear</q></p>
>
> This is supposed to generate the proper punctuation according to language /
> locality, but I don't know how smart browsers are about it.
>
> Chaals
>
> On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, clorisval pereira jr. wrote:
>
>   In some portuguese language literature books, the mdash is often
>   used to indicate changes between characters in a dialogue.
>
>   for example:
>
>   John and Mary were talking about their vacation.
>   -- I had a great time in venice.
>   -- Did you see many historical places?
>   -- No, I had spent most of time from one restaurant to another.
>
>   I would like to know what should be the proper way to markup
>   dialogues like this, using accessible HTML, without changing the
>   original text. Does using the entity &mdash; alone suggests it
>   is a dialogue?
>
>   I would appreciate your thoughts or comments.
>
>   best regards,
>   --
>   clorisval pereira jr.  cjunior@rnp.br
>
>
> --
> Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
> W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI  fax: +33 4 92 38 78 22
> Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
> (or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)
>

Received on Monday, 11 March 2002 16:36:46 UTC