> >At least French, German and English all use different symbols for quotation
> >marks, but the abstract idea is the same -- there is an opening quote and a
> >close quote. Elsewhere it was pointed out that quotes nest differently in
> >British and American English. All of these seem to me to be excellent
> >arguments to use markup instead of entities. With markup, the same
> >convention would be used across languages, but with entities, different
> >entitities will be needed in each language.
>
> I could just as easily use the same argument to support entities
> over markup--and in fact that's how the argument resolves to me.
>
> The better solution is to have both available.
I assumed we _were_ talking about both (as opposed to only markup).
Having only markup would be a big problem, because in those cases
where the author wanted to use a foreign quotation as-is (with the
original "foreign" quotation marks and quoting style), there'd be no
way to transmit it. If there were only one choice, it'd have to be
entities only, to avoid this problem.
I do like the idea of having quotations automatically displayed using
"local" quotation marks and quoting conventions. But how useful would
this be, really? If I'm displaying French or German text
untranslated, there's really no need to display it using quotation
marks and American style. And having a British text displayed with
British quoting conventions wouldn't kill me. So are we anticipating
someone posting an English-language text with French quoting
conventions??
--Dave.
-- Dave Mandl dmandl@panix.com http://www.wfmu.org/~davem