Re: Presentation of Q

Daniel Hale <dhale@pobox.com> writes:

> Chris Lilley wrote:
> 
> >> >These seems somewhat like a stylistic problem, since the quotes
> >> >really have no meaning themselves and only meant for display. However
> >> >CSS would not be able to specify this type of special quotes
> >> >rendering.
> >>
> >> Quotes marks DO have meaning!
> >
> >No, quote marks by themselves do not reliably indicate meaning, as
> >you will see if I describe myself as six feet four inches tall (6'4").
> >In plain text, I agree, meaning has to be inferred from quote marks.
> 
> *Quote* marks do indicate meaning - very reliably. Inch and foot marks
> (or primes and double primes) don't indicate quoting very well, because
> 1. they serve triple duty as typewriter-style quotations, inch and foot
> marks, and lat/lon minutes and seconds; and 2. primes aren't "open" and
> "closed" as are true typographic quotes. Your example uses inch and foot
> marks, but not quotes.
>
> One problem is that we can't address true quotes with current markup (am
> I right about this?). Mac, Unix, and Windows all use different character
> maps for these characters. Unicode, please, as fast as possible!

  Yes, you can.  That's what <Q></Q> is supposed to mean.  I think what you
mean is we cannot algorithmically infer what is a quote and what is not
based upon single and double quotes in the data.  Where are the quotes in
this sentence?

Bill Perry, who is 6'8", says "Eat my shorts."

  Is the quote ", says " or "Eat my shorts."?  You and I can tell right
away what is what, but getting a parser to guess correctly would be
difficult.

> Perhaps good quote markup should also automatically substitute French and 
> German quoting (for example) when the UA is a French or German version. 

  Exactly.  You can do this if the author uses <Q> and </Q> to delimit
quotes.

-Bill P.

Received on Monday, 5 May 1997 14:08:18 UTC