Re: Wish List for New Spec

On Dec 29, 14:27, dmandl@panix.com wrote:
> >    The better solution is to have both available. 
> 
> I assumed we _were_ talking about both (as opposed to only markup).
> Having only markup would be a big problem, because in those cases
> where the author wanted to use a foreign quotation as-is (with the
> original "foreign" quotation marks and quoting style), there'd be no
> way to transmit it.  If there were only one choice, it'd have to be
> entities only, to avoid this problem.

What?  One of us has misunderstood something here.  What about
<q lang=fr>Fous le camp, quitte vite et plus t&ocirc;t que cela 
Nos honn&ecirc;tes Ardennes.</q>

Since the context is obviously French, the quote will be
enclosed in "<<" and ">>"...

> I do like the idea of having quotations automatically displayed using
> "local" quotation marks and quoting conventions.  But how useful would
> this be, really?  If I'm displaying French or German text
> untranslated, there's really no need to display it using quotation
> marks and American style.  And having a British text displayed with

That is why the document should specify its language, and indeed
why HTML provides a simple but adequate mechanism for doing so...

Only problem is that an editor should no well enough to add
a language attribute when importing fragments from different
language documents.

> British quoting conventions wouldn't kill me.  So are we anticipating
> someone posting an English-language text with French quoting
> conventions??

Given that Cern is in French speaking Switzerland (or half of it is,
anyway -- the rest is in France), why not?  :-)

-Philip

Received on Saturday, 30 December 1995 02:01:29 UTC