Re: Curly Quotes and HTML

Peter Flynn <pflynn@curia.ucc.ie> wrote:
>   I have hust written a document on my Mac that uses curly quotes in
>   places. When viewed on anything but a Macintosh, I notice that they
>   don't appear right.  I have been unable to find anything in the ISO
>   ISO 8879 list.  What should I do if I want these curly quotes. Am
>   I supposed to use plain quotes and leave it up to the browser to do
>   the necessary work?
>
>That's what <Q> was for, but no browser implemented it.

	Lynx, and I think the freeware Mosic, implemented it long
ago.  But Lynx just implemented the nesting feature, using
alternating double-quotes versus `', and not the LANG regulation
of characters (yet 8-).


>							 I'm not sure
>what you mean by "curly quotes"...do you mean the normal printer's
>quotes used in normal typesetting? These won't work in HTML most of
>the time because the apostrophe and grave accent characters which used
>to be used to symbolise normal quotation marks contain the typewriter
>unidirectional apostrophe and a real floating grave accent in TT fonts
>(as far as I can see: check with the gurueax on TYPO-L). If you use
>the numeric character references they may or may not be implemented in
>browsers. 

	I suspect he's using numeric character references, or raw
characters, that work with MAC character sets but are in the invalid,
high control character, range for HTML.  You have the same problem of
invalid characters for Microsoft character sets infesting the Web.
The valid entities and numeric character reference for those are
above decimal 255, so it'll be a while yet before the majority of
clients handle them.  Sigh...

				Fote

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Received on Tuesday, 31 December 1996 16:46:23 UTC