Re: Wish List for New Spec

On Dec 31, 12:51, David Mandl wrote:
> >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 ">>"...
> 
> But in this case, the "<q lang=fr>" is an exact synonym for "<<", isn't it?
> It doesn't buy you anything.  I thought the original intention of <q> was
> to make documents language-independent, which is something that can't be
> conveyed with entities alone.  What your example says is "Substitute French
> quotation marks for the <q lang=fr>."  OK, so why not just type in the
> French quotation marks yourself?  The only advantage I can see is that if
> there's some client or computer that can't display those actual characters,
> it can substitute other ones.  But why can't it substitute another
> character for the _entity_?

Well, since the attribute "lang=fr" would apply to any nested tags,
such things as weights and measures, dates, sums of money, etc.
would also be displayed in the appropriate "locale" format..

For instance, "0h00, le 1<sup>er</sup> Janvier, 1970"...

> >Only problem is that an editor should no well enough to add
> >a language attribute when importing fragments from different
> >language documents.
> 
> I assume you mean the human kind of editor.  So you mean "I'm an American
> keying in this French document and I don't know what the French quoting
> convertions are, so I'd like the clients to take care of it for me"?  That
> seems more reasonable, I guess.  Still, that's not the way I understood the
> proposal, which (again) I thought was intended to make documents
> language-independent.

That would take care of all the other conversions, also... same as
using <lang fr>...</lang> around the whole thing.

Kind of hard for a browser to deduce this information from
seeing &#171;des choses y compris une date ...&187;

-Philip

Received on Tuesday, 2 January 1996 18:08:01 UTC