Re: True quotes

At 1:33p -0700 07/18/96, David Perrell wrote:
> Abigail wrote:
>
>> I've always failed to see the problem with quotes. I've been using ' ` and "
>> for 20 years or so, and anyone always understood what I meant.
>
>This is a form of esthetic retardation caused by over-exposure to
>character-mapped displays and typewritten text.
>
>Unlike the typewriter vestige ", true opening and closing quotes vary a
>great deal between fonts, and their distinctiveness grows with font size
>and screen resolution. For those who discern the emotional quality of
>letterforms and layouts, their lack is sorely felt.

Exactly.

Besides, the idea of ` as a "left quote" is highly debatable (and a pet peeve
of mine). The ASCII (American National Standard Code for Information
Interchange) character set was published without any name attached to that
glyph (also what is the point of a tilde that can't be combined? the world
may never know), so to use the ` as if it were a true left quote is extremely
bad form, IMO.


At 5:19p +0100 07/18/96, Abigail wrote:

>I don't get this. First you say you shouldn't use ‘ and friends - it
>is platform specific. But useage of a browser specific is a solution??

Yes! Not ideal, but it works TODAY, on MULTIPLE platforms. And it does not
violate anything in HTML. And there's nothing to stop Microsoft from adding
support for it, either. (Thomas, how about it?)

>I've always failed to see the problem with quotes. I've been using ' ` and "
>for 20 years or so, and anyone always understood what I meant.

You have no appreciation for the power of typography. Plain text does NOT
convey the entire message. Typography conveys a great deal of information,
and if you ignore that, you ignore quite a bit -- and show a disregard for
your reader. Don't delude yourself into thinking that ` is acceptable as a
left single quote; it is not.


At 3:17p -0700 07/18/96, David Perrell wrote:
>Jonathan Rosenne wrote:
>
>> The best solution is not named entities, but the <q> and </q> tags...
>
>Yes, a great solution for most situations. But I can also see using
>quote characters as design elements. Both solutions are desirable.

Can <q> and </q> take an attribute to specify single vs. double?


At 3:02p -0700 07/18/96, David Perrell wrote:
> Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
>
>> Eventually you'll be able to use the Unicode equivalents (which you can find
>> at <http://www.natural-innovations.com/boo/doc-charset.html>)
>
>According to my ISO tables, the table at this address is incorrect. It lists
>#96 as an acute.

Oops, typo! I'll fix it right away.

>> use...one of Netscape's supported charsets....
>> ...you'd have to require Netscape for accurate rendering.
>
>No less evil than &#147;codes like that&#148;.

See above.

__________________________________________________________________________
    Walter Ian Kaye <boo@best.com>     Programmer - Excel, AppleScript,
          Mountain View, CA                         ProTERM, FoxPro, HTML
 http://www.natural-innovations.com/     Musician - Guitarist, Songwriter

Received on Friday, 19 July 1996 15:37:37 UTC