Re: Wish List for New Spec
Abigail (abigail@tungsten.gn.iaf.nl)
Thu, 28 Dec 1995 07:25:10 +0100 (MET)
You, Philippe-Andre Prindeville wrote:
++
++ On Dec 27, 21:16, Michael Seaton wrote:
++ > bbreak@mit.edu (Ben Breakstone) wrote:
++ > [ snip ]
++ > > I believe the absence of typesetter's (or "curly," or "smart") quotation
++ > > marks from the english HTML entity set to be a grievous omission.
++ >
++ > These could be hinted at in the current standard by using <Q> </Q>.
++ >
++ > However this is still not a full substitute for having entity names,
++ > since there will likely be cases in which a solitary quote is desired.
++
++ Yes, indeed. You might have several paragraphs all from the same
++ person, with no interruption. In that case, each paragraph would start
++ with a left double quote, but no closing quote would be necessary.
++ So you could make </q> optional, like </p> is. Note: this is
++ highly language dependent. Not all latin scripted languages follow
++ this convention. I know French doesn't, for example.
Actually, you cannot not. </p> is optional because the end of a paragraph
can be determined from the context. A browser should not display documents
differently whether </p> is there or not.
Text-level markup, like <q> do not have optional closing tags, as not
always their end can not always be determined from the context. So,
</q> will always be required.
Furthermore, since containers cannot interweave, you cannot have
<p><q>...<p>...<p>...</q>. You would need <p><q>...</q> <p><q>...</q>.
A final remark, HTML is supposed to be a structure markup language,
is the shape of a quote really an HTML issue? How do various quote
sound on a speech device? I also think HTML is missing to more
important things than the shape of a quote.
Abigail