<q> and language-specific quotation marks

Brian <usenet1 (AT) mangymutt (DOT) com.invalid-remove-this-part> exclaimed in <dRVib.774038$uu5.134604@sccrnsc04>:

A number of UAs that process HTML and extract quotations ?

ok, *such as*?

That, Brian, was - I'm sorry to say - predictable. Sorry, I don't have
an extensive list. The two I know of is my own quote extracting gimmick and
the script Mark P. is using.

There are others, afaik. I'm sure Google can help.

--
- Tina Holmboe Greytower Technologies
tina (AT) greytower (DOT) net http://www.greytower.net/
[+46] 0708 557 905

In article <pan.2003.10.14.07.01.08.121634 (AT) goddamn (DOT) co.uk> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Toby A Inkster
<UseTheAddressInMySig (AT) deadspam (DOT) com> wrote:

Stan Brown wrote:

(Once again, I have restored the attribution that you stripped out.
Please do not put other people's words in my mouth. How would you
like it if I used your name on a quote that you disagree with?)

Toby A Inkster <UseTheAddressInMySig (AT) deadspam (DOT) com
Let's say you want to do this:

Can anyone see the irony?

You mean, because you use an obviously fake address and do it in
the wrong way?

The alternatives are to use what information, poor as it is, you
give, or to falsely attribute(*) your words, which I do not agree
with, to me.

(*) Yes, I know. See Fowler at "split infinitive".

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Stan Brown <the_stan_brown (AT) fastmail (DOT) fm> writes:

In article <bmeofi$519$05$1 (AT) news (DOT) t-online.com> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Bertilo Wennergren
bertilow (AT) gmx (DOT) net> wrote:
Stan Brown:

[stripped attribution restored]

Toby A Inkster <UseTheAddressInMySig (AT) deadspam (DOT) com
quote xml:lang="en">"Hello"</quote

I'm trying hard to understand what advantage that has over
"Hello"
but I'm failing.

Let's say you want to do this:
quote {
font-style: italic;
}
You can of course add a meaningless "span" to your unstylable piece of
naked text, but wouldn't a meaningful element be better?

No, I don't think so. More precisely, I don't think such a styling
in <quote> or <span> is ever appropriate. Maybe in other languages
things are different, but AFAIK in English inline quotes are not
styled differently from regular text.

Not true. I have read many books where inline quotes were
indicated by italics. Sometimes this was 100% consistent, and
other times it is frequently used (even in modern books) to
indicate "thought"-quotes. In ths case a "class" attribute might
be appropriate.

However, I agree that <quote xml:lang="en">"Hello"</quote> has no
advantage over "Hello" ... but <quote xml:lang="en">Hello</quote>
does. In particular, it places the burden of having to remember
what level of quotations to use upon the user agent, instead of
the author; and it allows you to easily quote a section of text
that contains a quote: you merely wrap another <quote/> around it
without having to change double-quotes to singles, etc.

-Micah

Stan Brown <the_stan_brown (AT) fastmail (DOT) fm> writes:

In article <bmfk1q$t6p$03$1 (AT) news (DOT) t-online.com> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Bertilo Wennergren
bertilow (AT) gmx (DOT) net> wrote:

(Once again, I have restored the attribution that you stripped out.
Please do not put other people's words in my mouth. How would you
like it if I used your name on a quote that you disagree with?)

Toby A Inkster <UseTheAddressInMySig (AT) deadspam (DOT) com
Let's say you want to do this:
quote {
font-style: italic;
}
You can of course add a meaningless "span" to your unstylable piece of
naked text, but wouldn't a meaningful element be better?

Stan Brown:
No, I don't think so. More precisely, I don't think such a styling
in <quote> or <span> is ever appropriate. Maybe in other languages
things are different, but AFAIK in English inline quotes are not
styled differently from regular text.

That seems to rule out lots of use of styling. E.g.:

strong>whatever</strong

strong {
color: red;
background-color: white;
}

Never style a "span"?

That is not what I said. I said I don't think that styling a quote
in italics is appropriate, whether you use <quote> or <span> to do
it.

Yes it is, though it may not have been what you meant. Read your
quote above again.

-Micah

Stan Brown <the_stan_brown (AT) fastmail (DOT) fm> writes:

In article <pan.2003.10.14.07.01.08.121634 (AT) goddamn (DOT) co.uk> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Toby A Inkster
UseTheAddressInMySig (AT) deadspam (DOT) com> wrote:
Stan Brown wrote:

(Once again, I have restored the attribution that you stripped out.
Please do not put other people's words in my mouth. How would you
like it if I used your name on a quote that you disagree with?)

Toby A Inkster <UseTheAddressInMySig (AT) deadspam (DOT) com
Let's say you want to do this:

Can anyone see the irony?

You mean, because you use an obviously fake address and do it in
the wrong way?

No, because you attribute to Toby A Inkster a quote which in fact
originated from Bertilo Wennergren, whilst you complain about
incorrect attributions to you (which I can't seem to find -- the
quoting levels make it entirely obvious which quotes are yours
and which aren't--though I'll agree that *all* levels should have
been properly attributed for absolute clarity). It's pretty
ironic to me, too :-)

This seems very much like the stereotypical spelling or grammar
corrections, which are of course obliged to contain at least one
such error in the complaint.

-Micah

Andreas Prilop <nhtcapri (AT) rrzn-user (DOT) uni-hannover.de> writes:

Micah Cowan <micah (AT) cowan (DOT) name> wrote:

Every browser I've seen supports &ldquo;, &rdquo;,

Young boy!

(Sorry I didn't obey the Followup-To header; mainly because I
don't understand why it broke the cross-post, and because I do
not read the c.i.w.a.h [yet]).

Yeah, you're right: I'm mistaken (for some reason, I'd thought
they were included in the entities for 3.2; obviously
not). However, every *current* browser I've seen supports them,
and the character reference equivalents (to which I frequently
convert these through postprocesing) are supported by the
previous generation of browsers. I don't encounter too many
people still surfing with browsers much older than that, so am
not too concerned; especially since those browsers would have
bigger issues with other standard-conformant but not
backwards-compatible facilities I frequently use.

-Micah

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> writes:

Micah Cowan <micah (AT) cowan (DOT) name> wrote:

Theoretically HTML 4 specifications use RFC language here, but in
practice their wording is not that formal.

The second paragraph of section 4 makes it 100% formal.

Thanks for a good laugh. Seriously, you haven't actually studied the
HTML specification much if you think that it really sticks to RFC
language.

I'd be much happier if you'd actually produce some quotes from
the spec to back up that statement, rather than just haughtily
assert that my notion is laughable. In particular, I can't think
of many instances in which you can prove that a specification
didn't mean "must" where it says "must", and "should" where it
says "should". And, in *particular*, I see no reason why you
should not interpret the "should" in 9.2.2, which we were
discussing, in accordance with the RFC language--especially since
the spec itself tells you to. After all, if you can't treat a
spec as law, then what good is a spec? Better to buy a book that
teaches you all sorts of non-conformant but "de facto standard"
extensions and base your code on that :-(

I'll concede the point about requiring CSS; so I will modify my
previous assertion to "you are *supposed* to use style sheets to
indicate your preferences for the handling of <q>"; there, does
that make you happier?

For my part, the mere fact that the W3C recommends their use
instead of typing quotation marks directly (see, e.g., checkpoint
3.7 of the WCAG) gives me pause to dismiss them, and a comparison
of the relative advantages/disadvantages to using typed-in
quotation marks causes me to conclude that would not a poor
practice to prefer to use <q> (were it not for the fact that it
is not well-supported by a certain browser with very large
market-share). This doesn't stop me from writing my DocBook XML
stuff using the <quote> element, though; and the major advantage
to this is that I can choose to convert these to XHTML <q> in my
XSLT stylesheets once they are well-supported in the mainstream;
but convert them to suitable quote-mark characters in the
meantime.

The only actual disadvantage to <q> that I can see is in the case
of long quotations containing actual paragraph breaks (for
example, in conversations), since each new paragraph should being
with opening quote-marks; but in this case, the quote doesn't
really fit the qualification of "inline quote".

-Micah

On Wed, 15 Oct 2003, Micah Cowan wrote:

Andreas Prilop <nhtcapri (AT) rrzn-user (DOT) uni-hannover.de> writes:

Micah Cowan <micah (AT) cowan (DOT) name> wrote:

Every browser I've seen supports &ldquo;, &rdquo;,

Young boy!
[...]
Yeah, you're right: I'm mistaken (for some reason, I'd thought
they were included in the entities for 3.2; obviously
not). However, every *current* browser I've seen supports them,

fair comment, but:

and the character reference equivalents (to which I frequently
convert these through postprocesing) are supported by the
previous generation of browsers.

So it seems you have no need to advocate use of the entity names!
While the difference in coverage can now be considered quite small,
and some would deem it no longer of any significance, the fact is that
one does get somewhat wider coverage with &#bignumber; notation for
these characters, than with the &entityname; notations which HTML4
defined.

The only other consideration I could think of is that some of the
entity names, such as &trade; , &Omega; etc are immediately intuitive
(if somewhat messy) if the browser doesn't understand them - and
therefore displays them as coded. Whereas browsers that are too old
(or incomplete - see WebTV) to understand &#bignumber; notation are
liable to display something incomprehensible and/or silly.

But by now I wouldn't consider that to be a substantive argument. If
folks choose to use old or incomplete software, I'm willing to go some
way - as far as it doesn't disadvantage other users - to maintaining
compatibility, but I see no call for heroic measures.

Stan Brown wrote:

Toby A Inkster wrote:

Can anyone see the irony?

You mean, because you use an obviously fake address and do it in
the wrong way?

No, because you complain about misattributing quotes and in the same post
misattribute a quote which Bertilo said to me.

And the address is real.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me - http://www.goddamn.co.uk/tobyink/?id=132

In article <m3oewi1b6h.fsf (AT) localhost (DOT) localdomain> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Micah Cowan <micah (AT) cowan (DOT) name>
wrote:

Stan Brown <the_stan_brown (AT) fastmail (DOT) fm> writes:
That is not what I said. I said I don't think that styling a quote
in italics is appropriate, whether you use <quote> or <span> to do
it.

Yes it is, though it may not have been what you meant. Read your
quote above again.

I have done so, and I stand by what I said.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/