Subject: language-based smart quotes
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Thu Jul 20 2000 - 00:25:58 CDT
koh> BTW, smart quotes should also be language dependant. E.g., when
koh> writing in french, '« ' and ' »' should be used. For this to
I don't disagree with your comment about language tagging below, but I
disagree with your specific example of language-based smart quotes.
(I would welcome other examples to show me the error of my ways.) The
simple reason is a disparity in keyboarding. Someone who types a
significant amount of '«' and '»' is a lot more likely to have a
keyboard setup with a direct or relatively simple way to type them.
It's certainly the case in the US and perhaps the case in other places
that essentially nobody has a keyboard with curly quotes on it.
koh> work, it must be possible to choose which language a document,
koh> and parts of a document is written in. This needs to be
koh> implemented sometime anyway, because of the spell checker. In the
koh> file format, language (changes) can be marked-up with
koh> xml:lang="language-code".
sam> This is a good idea, but how do you tell what language something is
sam> written in?
Easy enough for someone to have a default language (we already have
LOCALE for the UI) and be able to specify a different language just
like any other document property (e.g., font, bold, justification).
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Jul 20 2000 - 02:07:22 CDT