Re: Wish List for New Spec

> I believe the absence of typesetter's (or "curly," or "smart") quotation
> marks from the english HTML entity set to be a grievous omission...
> the straight ("dumb") quotes always look cursedly ugly...
> The second reason is semantic:.. The direction of single or double "smart
> quotes" indicates whether they begin or end a block of speech, or whether a
> single mark is acting as an apostrophe...

> Warm holiday wishes,
> Ben

The semantic information should be handled by semantic elements 
within HTML - in this case <Q> - as the interpretation of 
semantics can vary from browswer to browser and definitely varies 
from language to language.  Opposing smart quotes may be good
English, but they're not necessarily the best Swedish or Dutch.
By using <Q> and <LANG> elements browsers, should be able to get it 
right.

OTOH, I agree with you that sometimes you just _have_ to hard-code a 
character.  For those occasions I'd like to see character entities for 
the entire Latin-1 character set outside of the alphanumerics. &#182
isn't anybody's language! (It's the paragraph sign - which is used a 
whole lot in German law.)

Regards,
Joe   
------------------------------------------------
Joe Budge                        budge@clark.net

Received on Tuesday, 2 January 1996 17:58:31 UTC