Re: Apostrophes, quotation marks, keyboards and typography

From: Markus Kuhn (Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Jul 19 1999 - 05:29:26 EDT


Jonathan Rosenne wrote on 1999-07-18 22:14 UTC:
> 1. this is one of the reasons for <Q>text</Q> in HTML. The processor can
> substitute the correct character.
>
> In general, any word processor should allow the user to style the text as a
> quotation, rather than require him to type typographical characters.

I personally am not convinced that higher layer protocols should be used
to handle punctuation. This completely violates by concept of plain
text, and the existing practice of using higher layer protocols here
clearly just derives from the limitations of ASCII, an artifact of an
era that we are hopefully about to leave behind us. Higher layer
protocols such as SGML are fine for things like font selection and other
formatting and logical structuring, but quotation marks and other
punctuation are too much part of the raw text than that I would like to
see them handled via hacks such as <Q>. Higher layer protocols should in
my opinion not represent the actual textual content of the text, but
give only auxiliary structuring and representation hints. Therefore I
don't like to see markup for quotation marks, just as I don't like the
idea to have to markup conditional clauses, sentences, and perhaps even
paragraphs (not sure about the last one though).

> 2. The situation for Hyphen-Minus is quite similar.

Agreed, it is equally confusing and keyboard entry conventions should be
carefully standardized here as well.

Mark Davis wrote on 1999-07-18 17:47 UTC:
> There seems to be some misunderstanding. "The Unicode Standard®, Version
> 2.1" gives the following text (see
> http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr8.html#3.6 Apostrophe Semantics
> Errata):
>
> U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE is preferred where the character
> is to represent a modifier letter (for example, in transliterations
> to indicate a glottal stop.) In the latter case, it is also referred
> to as a letter apostrophe.
>
> U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred where the character is to
> represent a punctuation mark, as in "We've been here before." In the
> latter case, U+2019 is also referred to as a punctuation apostrophe.

Excellent! I missed that 2.1 correction, and I am delighted to see that
this was already fixed nicely. So U+02BC is one thing less to worry
about and the Microsoft Word practice actually does conform to the
standard. Thanks for the reply.

So the rest is really up to the keyboard standards community to fix.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>



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