which quotation marks to use

[The Bicycling Guitarist]

Hi. For many years I have been using " for double quotation marks in
the HTML code, but the opening and closing quotation marks render the same
in my browser.

I'm considering going through and using “ and ” (in pairs as
needed) instead. Are there any *disadvantages* to doing so, besides the time
it will take to make the change?

Thanks.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit The Bicycling Guitarist:

For many years I have been using " for double quotation
marks in the HTML code,

In vain, I'm afraid, since they give no benefit over using just the "
character (except inside attribute values).

but the opening and closing quotation marks
render the same in my browser.

As defined, since " unambiguously means the ASCII quotation mark.

I'm considering going through and using “ and ” (in pairs
as needed) instead.

For English (in American style), that's OK.

Are there any *disadvantages* to doing so,
besides the time it will take to make the change?

Not really these days. Years ago, they were somewhat risky due to lack of
support in browsers, and people (including me) advised against using them,
since there was so little (namely typographic details) to be won and so much
(namely integrity of content) to be lost. But by now, the odds of losing are
so minuscule that they can be ignored.

I haven't taken the trouble of converting existing pages except when I make
some major revision anyway. Note that if you use the curly quotes, you
should - for stylistic uniformity - also use curly single quotes and
apostrophes (instead of ASCII apostrophe, '), en or em dashes or minus sign
when appropriate instead of ASCII hyphen, and maybe even the horizontal
ellipsis character instead of "...".
(See http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/windows-chars.html )

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[mbstevens]

On Fri, 18 May 2007 11:57:26 -0700, The Bicycling Guitarist wrote:

Hi. For many years I have been using " for double quotation marks in
the HTML code, but the opening and closing quotation marks render the same
in my browser.

I'm considering going through and using “ and ” (in pairs as
needed) instead. Are there any *disadvantages* to doing so, besides the time
it will take to make the change?

Thanks.

No need to use an entity at all, usually:

<q>Use to highlight short quotations from
outside resources.</q>

....will let the visitor's browser decide how and if to render the
quotation marks. Support for the element is not universal, but now common.
An optional cite attribute can point to a URI of the source.

Suppose you decide to use an entity anyway. If you are also kind enough
to let the visitors decide about their own fonts, support is
probably more likely for &quot than the others. If you choose the
visitors' fonts, they may or may not have the fonts you specify, so their
browser or CSS again chooses the font anyway.

So, any way you cut it, some visitors are not going to get exactly what
you want them to get.

If you use &ldquo; and &rdquo;, be sure to specify a very, very common
font that supports them, and which is supported in most browsers.
I usually just go with <q>...</q>. In CSS the :lang pseudoclass
lets you specify the kinds of quotes for a language in CSS with markup
like:

q:lang(en) {"'" "'"};
q:lang(fr) {"«" "»" };

--
mbstevens
http://www.mbstevens.com/

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit mbstevens:

<q>Use to highlight short quotations from
outside resources.</q>

Bzzzt. Are you intentionally distributing disinformation or just ignorant?

Support for the element is not universal, but now common.

False. Let me guess - you didn't bother testing, or you are just trolling?

If you use &ldquo; and &rdquo;, be sure to specify a very, very common
font that supports them, and which is supported in most browsers.

Nonsense. Virtually any font contains them.

I usually just go with <q>...</q>. In CSS the :lang pseudoclass
lets you specify the kinds of quotes for a language in CSS with markup
like:

q:lang(en) {"'" "'"};
q:lang(fr) {"«" "»" };

And, as usual, both rules are wrong (in addition to not being supported e.g.
by IE).

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[mbstevens]

On Fri, 18 May 2007 21:34:23 +0000, mbstevens wrote:

q:lang(en) {"'" "'"};
q:lang(fr) {"«" "»" };

Pardon, got sloppy there. Should be:

q:lang(en) {quotes: "'" "'"};
q:lang(fr) {quotes: "«" "»" };

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit mbstevens:

Pardon, got sloppy there. Should be:

>q:lang(en) {quotes: "'" "'"};
q:lang(fr) {quotes: "«" "»" };

Still both wrong, by the rules of English and French punctuation.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Dr J R Stockton]

In comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html message
<_G************@newsfe12.lga>, Fri, 18 May 2007 11:57:26, The Bicycling
Guitarist <Ch***@TheBicyclingGuitarist.netposted:

>Hi. For many years I have been using &quot; for double quotation marks in
the HTML code, but the opening and closing quotation marks render the same
in my browser.

I'm considering going through and using &ldquo; and &rdquo; (in pairs as
needed) instead. Are there any *disadvantages* to doing so, besides the time
it will take to make the change?

Provided that &quot; occurs in the source only in properly-matched pairs
(not necessarily the case in a page discussing characters or containing
javascript, for example), it should be fairly quick to make the change
with an adequate RegExp-capable programmable editor.

--
(c) John Stockton, Surrey, UK. ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk Turnpike v6.05 IE 6.
Web <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/- FAQish topics, acronyms, & links.
I find MiniTrue useful for viewing/searching/altering files, at a DOS prompt;
free, DOS/Win/UNIX, <URL:http://www.idiotsdelight.net/minitrue/unsupported.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit Dr J R Stockton:

Provided that &quot; occurs in the source only in properly-matched
pairs (not necessarily the case in a page discussing characters or
containing javascript, for example), it should be fairly quick to
make the change with an adequate RegExp-capable programmable editor.

Yes, but what would happen to quotation marks written as " or to apostrophes
or to hyphens that should be dashes or minus signs? My point is that
converting from ASCII punctuation to proper orthography is more than just
making quotation marks "smart", and the process as a whole is rather
difficult to automate.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Adrienne Boswell]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed "Jukka K. Korpela"
<jk******@cs.tut.fiwriting in news:OMo3i.165793$Uh7.130437
@reader1.news.saunalahti.fi:

>Are there any *disadvantages* to doing so,
besides the time it will take to make the change?

Not really these days

I have to disagree with that... but then I have a special reason for
wanting to disagree. Clients sometimes send me stuff to copy and paste
into their web sites, and I have to go back and make sure that the page
doesn't show something strange. Usually, I just replace them with simple
".

--
Adrienne Boswell at Home
Arbpen Web Site Design Services
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share

[Dr J R Stockton]

In comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html message <MoG3i.166254$wQ5.160313@
reader1.news.saunalahti.fi>, Sat, 19 May 2007 20:24:18, Jukka K. Korpela
<jk******@cs.tut.fiposted:

>Scripsit Dr J R Stockton:

>Provided that &quot; occurs in the source only in properly-matched
pairs (not necessarily the case in a page discussing characters or
containing javascript, for example), it should be fairly quick to
make the change with an adequate RegExp-capable programmable editor.

Yes, but what would happen to quotation marks written as " or to
apostrophes or to hyphens that should be dashes or minus signs? My
point is that converting from ASCII punctuation to proper orthography
is more than just making quotation marks "smart", and the process as a
whole is rather difficult to automate.

Doing part of the task automatically or semi-automatically will reduce
the amount of task left to do by hand.

Unless I was certain that all &quot; were in properly-matched pairs, I'd
do it that substitution semi-automatically, with each change queried.
It's easier to assess whether each suggested change is certainly right,
and type Y (else N), than it is to type the change entirely manually.

Likewise, in ordinary text, every occurrence of <letter>'s<whitespace>
is a probable candidate for converting to use a formal apostrophe; and
probably every <letter>'<letter>. Things may be harder if the
underlying text is Kikuyu, Xhosa, Klingon, or includes APL.

Another use of such a tool is to check for common typos. It's tiresome
to use a general spell-checker on my Web source files, because of the
topics and content. But every page, before upload, is checked both with
TIDY and with a scan for these lower-case "words" - fot onr shouls toy
thr foind anf ar hoe 8061 wnen ot os is - which I often type wrongly. I
don't write about playthings or gardening; and in embedded javascript I
just avoid those identifiers. But each proposed substitution is
queried.

--
(c) John Stockton, Surrey, UK. ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk Turnpike v6.05 IE 6.
Web <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/- FAQish topics, acronyms, & links.
I find MiniTrue useful for viewing/searching/altering files, at a DOS prompt;
free, DOS/Win/UNIX, <URL:http://www.idiotsdelight.net/minitrue/unsupported.

[Andreas Prilop]

On Fri, 18 May 2007, The Bicycling Guitarist wrote:

X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.3028

With

Tools Options Send
Mail Sending Format Plain Text Settings Message format MIME
News Sending Format Plain Text Settings Message format MIME
Encode text using: None

you can even include typographical quotation marks (“ ”) in your messages
and we can easier discuss them.

I'm considering going through and using &ldquo; and &rdquo; (in pairs as
needed) instead. Are there any *disadvantages* to doing so, besides the time
it will take to make the change?

The numerical character references (“ ”) and the actual
characters (“ ”) are better supported. With "charset=windows-1252"
or "charset=utf-8" you do not need character references.

--
In memoriam Alan J. Flavell
http://groups.google.com/groups/sear...Alan.J.Flavell

[Warren Steel]

Scripsit Jukka K. Korpela:

I haven't taken the trouble of converting existing pages except when I
make some major revision anyway. Note that if you use the curly quotes,
you should - for stylistic uniformity - also use curly single quotes and
apostrophes (instead of ASCII apostrophe, '), en or em dashes or minus
sign when appropriate instead of ASCII hyphen, and maybe even the
horizontal ellipsis character instead of "...".
(See http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/windows-chars.html )

Most of these can be done by Stephen Poley's sed scripts at
http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmat...er_quotes.html

--
Warren Steel mu***@olemiss.edu
Deptartment of Music University of Mississippi
http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~mudws/

[patrick j]

On May 18, 2007 The Bicycling Guitarist wrote:

Hi. For many years I have been using &quot; for double quotation marks in
the HTML code, but the opening and closing quotation marks render the same
in my browser.

I'm considering going through and using &ldquo; and &rdquo; (in pairs as
needed) instead. Are there any *disadvantages* to doing so, besides the time
it will take to make the change?

Up until fairly recently I used &ldquo; and &rdquo; as well as &lsquo; and
&rsquo; when writing text for use in HTML because I thought it looked
nicer. However I stopped because I just decided it didn't look nicer after
all :). Now I just use " and ', for me they look neater.

I used to put them in using a macro I'd created for my text editor. It
would go through the file first finding a chunk of text that wasn't inside
any HTML tags, then change the quotes to the entities using RegEx. However
it would change the quote characters in javascripts and suchlike. I think
if I'd remained interested in using them I would have modified the macro so
that it became savvy to doing that.

Taking them out is very easy, you can just use a RegEx find/replace
expression.

After putting them all in you might look at them and think that you'd
prefer not to have them like me :)

--
Patrick - Brighton, UK
If you wish email me from my web-site: <http://www.patrickjames.me.uk>
Inventory service in Sussex: <http://www.inventoryworks.co.uk>

[Stan Brown]

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 11:02:44 +0100 from patrick j
<us**********@googlemail.com>:

Up until fairly recently I used &ldquo; and &rdquo; as well as &lsquo; and
&rsquo; when writing text for use in HTML because I thought it looked
nicer. However I stopped because I just decided it didn't look nicer after
all :). Now I just use " and ', for me they look neater.

This depends very much on which font is in use. Remember that your
visitors may not be using the same font as you.

Personally, I do use proper curly quotes and apostrophes.(*) In some
fonts they're curved only slightly, usually because they look better
that way. I suppose there may be a font where straight quotes
actually look better than curly, but I've never seen one. I know
there are many pages where straight quotes look amateurish and geeky
to me, and I've never seen one where curly quotes looked wrong.

(*) As entities, of course, not the Microsoft non-standard characters
146-149.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/200..._wont_help_you

[David E. Ross]

Stan Brown wrote:

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 11:02:44 +0100 from patrick j
<us**********@googlemail.com>:

>Up until fairly recently I used &ldquo; and &rdquo; as well as &lsquo; and
&rsquo; when writing text for use in HTML because I thought it looked
nicer. However I stopped because I just decided it didn't look nicer after
all :). Now I just use " and ', for me they look neater.

This depends very much on which font is in use. Remember that your
visitors may not be using the same font as you.

Personally, I do use proper curly quotes and apostrophes.(*) In some
fonts they're curved only slightly, usually because they look better
that way. I suppose there may be a font where straight quotes
actually look better than curly, but I've never seen one. I know
there are many pages where straight quotes look amateurish and geeky
to me, and I've never seen one where curly quotes looked wrong.

(*) As entities, of course, not the Microsoft non-standard characters
146-149.

At 12 point, I can't see the difference between "curly" and "straight"
quotes in Arial, which is the most common font on Macs (installed on
96.40%) and the 6th most common on PCs (94.78%).

--

David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>.

Don't ask "Why is there road rage?" Instead, ask
"Why NOT Road Rage?" or "Why Is There No Such
Thing as Fast Enough?"
<http://www.rossde.com/roadrage.html>

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit David E. Ross:

At 12 point, I can't see the difference between "curly" and "straight"
quotes in Arial,

I can, and my eyesight is far from perfect - but admittedly my "typographic
eye" is better trained than John Q. Public's. If you take a second look,
you'll see that the correct quotation marks are different from each other
(i.e., left quotation mark is different from right quotation mark), slightly
curved, and differ from the Ascii ("straight") quotation mark also by being
somewhat finer and with the two comma-like parts closer to each other than
the two short vertical bars in the Ascii quotation mark.

In serif fonts, the difference is much clearer, but even in 12pt Arial,
there is a visible difference. Verdana is a different story - a
typographer's nightmare at least in the shapes of quotation marks.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[andrew]

On 2007-06-10, Jukka K. Korpela <jk******@cs.tut.fiwrote:

Scripsit David E. Ross:

>At 12 point, I can't see the difference between "curly" and "straight"
quotes in Arial,

[...]

If you take a second look,
you'll see that the correct quotation marks are different from each other
(i.e., left quotation mark is different from right quotation mark), slightly
curved, and differ from the Ascii ("straight") quotation mark also by being
somewhat finer and with the two comma-like parts closer to each other than
the two short vertical bars in the Ascii quotation mark.

[...]

Can I ask then: in your opinion is there a 'correct' use of either
straight or left / right quotation marks in web pages or is it a
matter of standardisation across a site?

Thanks,

Andrew

--
Andrew's Corner
http://people.aapt.net.au/~adjlstrong/dapper.html

[Stan Brown]

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 07:45:27 -0700 from David E. Ross
<no****@nowhere.not>:

At 12 point, I can't see the difference between "curly" and "straight"
quotes in Arial, which is the most common font on Macs (installed on
96.40%) and the 6th most common on PCs (94.78%).

I believe you. But you can't assume that your Web visitors use the
same font as you (even the same Arial), or the same size, or that
their eyes work like yours.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/200..._wont_help_you

[Sherm Pendley]

andrew <no****@andrew.invalidwrites:

Can I ask then: in your opinion is there a 'correct' use of either
straight or left / right quotation marks in web pages

One immediately-obvious example is a page that displays Perl, C, or some
other source code that requires straight quotes. I've copied & pasted code
from sites that replaced those with the r/l quotation marks, and had to
make extensive repairs before it would work properly.

sherm--

--
Web Hosting by West Virginians, for West Virginians: http://wv-www.net
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net

[David E. Ross]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

Scripsit David E. Ross:

>At 12 point, I can't see the difference between "curly" and "straight"
quotes in Arial,

I can, and my eyesight is far from perfect - but admittedly my "typographic
eye" is better trained than John Q. Public's. If you take a second look,
you'll see that the correct quotation marks are different from each other
(i.e., left quotation mark is different from right quotation mark), slightly
curved, and differ from the Ascii ("straight") quotation mark also by being
somewhat finer and with the two comma-like parts closer to each other than
the two short vertical bars in the Ascii quotation mark.

In serif fonts, the difference is much clearer, but even in 12pt Arial,
there is a visible difference. Verdana is a different story - a
typographer's nightmare at least in the shapes of quotation marks.

At even 14 point, I have to get much closer to my monitor than usual to
see the difference between "straight" and "curly" quotes for Arial. The
latter appear merely longer than the former. Only when I expand to 16
point do I see a curve to the latter.

In the meantime, I have no trouble even at 12 point seeing the
difference between "straight" and "curly" quotes for Verdana.

For a sans-serif font, I prefer Verdana over Arial because each Roman
letter in Verdana is distinct. With Arial, it is impossible to
distinguish between an upper-case I (eye) and a lower-case l (ell),
which can cause problems when giving a URL in a document that does not
have selectable links.

For my personal Web pages, I use only "straight" quotes and rarely
specify a font.

--

David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>.

Don't ask "Why is there road rage?" Instead, ask
"Why NOT Road Rage?" or "Why Is There No Such
Thing as Fast Enough?"
<http://www.rossde.com/roadrage.html>

[David E. Ross]

Stan Brown wrote:

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 07:45:27 -0700 from David E. Ross
<no****@nowhere.not>:

>At 12 point, I can't see the difference between "curly" and "straight"
quotes in Arial, which is the most common font on Macs (installed on
96.40%) and the 6th most common on PCs (94.78%).

I believe you. But you can't assume that your Web visitors use the
same font as you (even the same Arial), or the same size, or that
their eyes work like yours.

That's why I rarely specify a font for my personal Web pages. That's
also why I never specify a font-size except as a percentage of the
visitor's default size.

For a charity whose Web site I maintain, the CSS indicates sans-serif
with a preference for Verdana (for a reason I give elsewhere in this
thread) but no font-sizes except as percentages of the visitor's default.

For my own use, I default to Georgia at 13 pixels for Web browsing and
at 12 point for document composition.

--

David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>.

Don't ask "Why is there road rage?" Instead, ask
"Why NOT Road Rage?" or "Why Is There No Such
Thing as Fast Enough?"
<http://www.rossde.com/roadrage.html>

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit andrew:

Can I ask then: in your opinion is there a 'correct' use of either
straight or left / right quotation marks in web pages or is it a
matter of standardisation across a site?

The orthographically correct use is defined by the rules of each human
language or, in the case of presenting computer code as content, each
computer language. Then you need to consider the typographic issues: in some
fonts, some quotation marks are very poor since they do not reflect the
identity of the character.

It's a judgement call whether you use the Ascii quotation mark " and the
Ascii apostrophe ' as surrogates for correct quotation marks. Years ago, I
had strong arguments in favor of such usage, since it was more important to
have the message delivered reliably than to have typographic quality.
However, things change, and I'd say that at present, using the correct
quotation marks is safe enough and a good way to make a visible difference -
since the bulk of web pages uses the poor surrogates.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Sherm Pendley]

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jk******@cs.tut.fiwrites:

present, using the correct quotation marks is safe enough and a good
way to make a visible difference -

Assuming it's done correctly, of course. :-\

I wish I had a nickel for every ? I've seen instead of quotation marks,
emdashes, ellipses, etc. on pages with mislabeled encoding. You have to
either get the encoding right, or use entities.

sherm--

--
Web Hosting by West Virginians, for West Virginians: http://wv-www.net
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit Sherm Pendley:

I wish I had a nickel for every ? I've seen instead of quotation
marks, emdashes, ellipses, etc. on pages with mislabeled encoding.
You have to either get the encoding right, or use entities.

Or character references. I'm actually quite used to typing ”, –
etc. instead of entity references like &rdquot; and &endash;. (The careful
reader naturally notices that I mistyped the "mnemonic" names here, as many
people do in actual coding.) Besides, &rdquo; is _misleadingly_ mnemonic to
me, since in my native language, the "right double quotation mark" is used
both as an opening (left) quote and as a closing (right) quote.

Actually, you mostly get away with it anyway, since most browsers really
imply windows-1252, if the document's encoding is not declared or it is
declared as iso-8859-1. I'm not saying that authors should be that sloppy;
just that they, or their visitors, are usually not punished for the
sloppyness of using windows-1252 encoded characters without due
considerations.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Helmut Richter]

On Tue, 12 Jun 2007, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

people do in actual coding.) Besides, &rdquo; is _misleadingly_ mnemonic to
me, since in my native language, the "right double quotation mark" is used
both as an opening (left) quote and as a closing (right) quote.

And in mine, the "left" one, “ is *exclusively* used as right one:
„Text to be quoted“

Actually, you mostly get away with it anyway, since most browsers really imply
windows-1252, if the document's encoding is not declared or it is declared as
iso-8859-1.

.... which does no harm because the code points where they differ are not
used for anything meaningful in either ISO 8859-1 or Unicode.

I'm not saying that authors should be that sloppy;

They should not, of course. But often, it is advisable to declare
one's own local environment (files, editors, ...) as CP-1252 when it is in
reality ISO 8859-1. If it is indeed pure ISO 8859-1, it makes no
difference; if the same user is sometimes using a Windows PC with CP-1252,
he is still on the safe side. (This is for correct conversion into
non-propriertary codes which then appear in the declarations of (X)HTML
files -- where propriertary codes should be avoided.)

--
Helmut Richter

[Helmut Richter]

On Tue, 12 Jun 2007, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

Or character references. I'm actually quite used to typing ”, –

Or <q... </q>. With a style sheet you can then select the quotes
according to the language:

:lang(de) { quotes:"\201E" "\201C" "\201A" "\2018"; }
:lang(de-DE) { quotes:"\00BB" "\00AB" "\203A" "\2039"; }
:lang(de-CH) { quotes:"\00AB" "\00BB" "\2039" "\203A"; }
:lang(en) { quotes:"\201C" "\201D" "\2018" "\2019"; }
:lang(fr) { quotes:"\00AB\A0" "\A0\00BB" "\2039\A0" "\A0\203A"; }

--
Helmut Richter

[Andreas Prilop]

On Tue, 12 Jun 2007, Sherm Pendley wrote:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

I wish I had a nickel for every ? I've seen instead of quotation marks,

^

emdashes, ellipses, etc. on pages with mislabeled encoding. You have to
either get the encoding right, or use entities.

Quite*so.

--
In memoriam Alan J. Flavell
http://groups.google.com/groups/sear...Alan.J.Flavell

[Andreas Prilop]

On Sun, 10 Jun 2007, Stan Brown wrote:

Personally, I do use proper curly quotes and apostrophes.(*)
(*) As entities, of course, not the Microsoft non-standard characters
146-149.

There is nothing wrong with
[charset=windows-1252] “ ” ‘ ’
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nht...an.win#symbols

--
In memoriam Alan J. Flavell
http://groups.google.com/groups/sear...Alan.J.Flavell

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit Helmut Richter:

Or <q... </q>. With a style sheet you can then select the quotes
according to the language:

Actually that occurred to me too, as a matter of completeness, but I quickly
rejected the idea of mentioning it. Using <q>...</qis far too unsafe in
HTML authoring. Many browsers still in common use don't recognize the markup
at all.

>lang(de) { quotes:"\201E" "\201C" "\201A" "\2018"; }

I'm too tired to check whether the characters are correct there. (In most
examples I've seen, even in CSS specifications, they aren't.) It is
sufficient to say that no version of IE implements the quotes property, so
in the vast majority of browsing situations, the quotation would not be
indicated as a quotation in any way.

>lang(fr) { quotes:"\00AB\A0" "\A0\00BB" "\2039\A0" "\A0\203A"; }

Well, that one is wrong at least. The French punctuation rules require a
"fine space" - not a normal space and not a no-break space, which has the
same width as a normal space (though the no-break space is usually treated
as non-stretchable and non-shrinkable even in situations where a normal
space may be stretched or shrunk, especially in justification). There's no
satisfactory solution to this dilemma, but if you really want to get as
close to correct punctuation as possible, use CSS, Luke (even though this
means rather awkward extra markup); see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/french.html#spacing

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Man-wai Chang]

There is nothing wrong with

[charset=windows-1252] “ ” ‘ ’
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nht...an.win#symbols

Sendmail needs this kind quotation marks in its m4 config files.

--
iTech Consulting Services Limited
Expert in ePOS (Point-Of-Sales) solutions
Website: http://www.itech.com.hk (IE only)
Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone]

[Stan Brown]

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 05:09:47 -0400 from Sherm Pendley <spamtrap@dot-
app.org>:

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jk******@cs.tut.fiwrites:

present, using the correct quotation marks is safe enough and a good
way to make a visible difference -

Assuming it's done correctly, of course. :-\

I wish I had a nickel for every ? I've seen instead of quotation marks,
emdashes, ellipses, etc. on pages with mislabeled encoding. You have to
either get the encoding right, or use entities.

It's not just quotes.

I use http://www.excite.com for my local TV listings, since there is
no longer any printed guide worth the name. Accented characters come
through wrong, every time. I'm not certain I remember this particular
example right, but for example &eacute; comes through as &yacute;.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/200..._wont_help_you

[Jim Carlock]

Scripsit David E. Ross:

At 12 point, I can't see the difference between "curly" and "straight"
quotes in Arial,

"David E. Ross" wrote...
: At even 14 point, I have to get much closer to my monitor than usual
: to see the difference between "straight" and "curly" quotes for Arial.
: The latter appear merely longer than the former. Only when I expand
: to 16 point do I see a curve to the latter.

The configuration of the monitors can play a role in this as well. The
DPI setting (common on Microsoft Windows OS) is typically set to
96 DPI (dots per inch). However, there's another setting, 120 DPI
quite common, but I'm just not sure how many people use the "other"
DPI settings. And I know nothing about MacIntosh systems.

To get to the DPI on a Windows OS, right click upon the desktop.
Then click on the "Settings" tab. Then click upon the Advanced
button.

Once you switch from 120 to 96 or vice versa you see a big change
in things.

It would be interesting to know the DPI settings on your system, and
upon others.

--
Jim Carlock