Re: www-html-d Digest V95 #86

In reply to Gregory Woodhouse's post:

> At least French, German and English all use different symbols for quotation
> marks, but the abstract idea is the same -- there is an opening quote and a
> close quote. Elsewhere it was pointed out that quotes nest differently in
> British and American English. All of these seem to me to be excellent
> arguments to use markup instead of entities. With markup, the same
> convention would be used across languages, but with entities, different
> entitities will be needed in each language.

An argument to the contrary could also be made: if I write something
in American english, using American quoting conventions, I might want
it to appear just the way I wrote it, even to a British or French
reader.  Another author might prefer to have his readers see his text
represented using the quoting conventions with which *they* are
familiar.  Ultimately, we may need both mechanisms, in order to fully
represent the intent of different authors.

  -- Michael McClennen
  -- michaelm@eecs.umich.edu

Received on Monday, 1 January 1996 15:57:10 UTC