Re: Magic Elements (was: kelvSYC's Thoughts on the new XHTML Draft)

On Sunday, May 11, 2003, at 05:44 Europe/Helsinki, Jelks Cabaniss wrote:

> c. Keep <q> and *recommend* its use (where appropriate).

I prefer removing <q> in favor of <quote>. <q> is about using 
fancy-looking markup as a surrogate for punctuation because it is 
somehow thought that the proper punctuation can't be written. They are 
more about surrogates for punctuation than about exact markup 
delimiting a quoted string, because in practice the end tag would be 
placed where the closing quote would be placed in en-US even if that 
meant the last character of the delimited string wasn’t actually be 
quoted from an outside source but was part of a surrounding sentence.

Consider
<p xml:lang="en-GB"><q>I’m quoting</q>, she said.</p>
<p xml:lang="en-US"><q>I’m quoting,</q> he said.</p>

>  He said, <quote>"I'm stuck with hardcoded ugly quotes
>  but I can be used by anybody in the world if they
>  really want to go to that much trouble!"</quote>
>
>  Smiling at his boorishness, she replied, <q>I can't
>  be deeply nested, and I only work well in a Gringo-
>  Eurotrash world, but I'm a heck of a lot better
>  looking than you are.</q>
>
>  Ambling hand-in-hand (they were, after all, soulmates)
>  off into the sunset, he sweetly (and un-marked-up-edly)
>  murmured, &ldquo;We DO make a beautiful couple, don't
>  we?&rdquo;

<quote>“We look as good as the two last candidates and we don’t need 
markup or entities to stand in for us. While we’re at it, we can 
delimit a quotation with other characters that allegedly can’t be typed 
such as €, α and ů.”</quote>

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://www.iki.fi/hsivonen/

Received on Thursday, 15 May 2003 13:35:30 UTC