Right way to quote

[Philipp Lenssen]

Using a combination of HTML and CSS, what is the right way to quote?

I'm using this in my blog:
<p>My text.</p>

<p><q>"This is a quotation."<br />
<cite>-- John</cite></q>
</p>

<p>My text continues.</p>
I will now indent the q-element and define it as block-display. Also, I
will make it italic, and make the cite-element normal (no italics).
However I understand indented quotations should not be using quotes, but
the indention is via CSS, which is optional. As I understand it, CSS
could also be used to insert the quoting characters, even though browser
support is bad (content: open-quote;?).

Does anyone have any good way of quoting? I'm not talking about inline
quotes but the kind where you have one or several paragraphs.

[Steve Pugh]

Philipp Lenssen <ph*************@bb-k.com> wrote:

Does anyone have any good way of quoting? I'm not talking about inline
quotes but the kind where you have one or several paragraphs.

<blockquote>

Steve

--
"My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you,
I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor

Steve Pugh <st***@pugh.net> <http://steve.pugh.net/>

[Alexander Huber]

Hi,

Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Does anyone have any good way of quoting? I'm not talking about inline
quotes but the kind where you have one or several paragraphs.

<blockquote>?
see: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#h-9.2.2

Best wishes,

Alexander.
--
Alexander Huber
mailto:al*****@gmx.net

[Philipp Lenssen]

In article <bh**********@news.ox.ac.uk>, al*****@gmx.net says...

(...)
Philipp Lenssen wrote:

Does anyone have any good way of quoting? I'm not talking about inline
quotes but the kind where you have one or several paragraphs.

<blockquote>?
see: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#h-9.2.2

Hmm, the "cite" attribute of a blockquote doesn't seem to be rendered in
popular browsers. Where would I put that information? (Author, date,
link with page-title.)

[Nick Kew]

In article <MP************************@news.individual.de>, one of infinite monkeys
at the keyboard of Philipp Lenssen <ph*************@bb-k.com> wrote:

<div class="outline suggestion">

<blockquote cite="#foo">

Hmm, the "cite" attribute of a blockquote doesn't seem to be rendered in
popular browsers. Where would I put that information?

</blockquote>

<cite id="foo">Philipp Lenssen, 15/8/03</cite>
</div>

--
Nick Kew

In urgent need of paying work - see http://www.webthing.com/~nick/cv.html

[Tina Holmboe]

Stan Brown <th************@fastmail.fm> exclaimed in <MP************************@news.odyssey.net>:

In article <MP************************@News.Individual.DE> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Philipp Lenssen
<ph*************@bb-k.com> wrote:

Hmm, the "cite" attribute of a blockquote doesn't seem to be rendered in
popular browsers. Where would I put that information? (Author, date,
link with page-title.)

I am not happy about hiding useful information in attributes. Since
users may print pages to read later, I ask myself, what would a user
want to see on a printed copy of this page?

<blockquote cite="http://www.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=MPG.19a707b9dd84182098968c%40News .Individual.DE"
title="Philipp Lenssen in MP************************@News.Individual.DE">
<p>
Hmm, the "cite" attribute of a blockquote doesn't seem to be rendered in
popular browsers. Where would I put that information?
</p>
</blockquote>

and

@media print {
blockquote:after {
content : "- " attr(title) ;
}
}

might then be an alternative to Nick's example. It'll print well and supply
a link to the source of the quote.

--
- Tina Holmboe Greytower Technologies
ti**@greytower.net http://www.greytower.net/
[+46] 0708 557 905

[Steve Fulton]

David Dorward wrote:

Tina Holmboe wrote:

@media print {
blockquote:after {
content : "- " attr(title) ;
}
}

That's rather nice. Although I think I might refine it to:

blockquote:after {
content: "- " attr(title) ;
display: block;
text-align: right;
}

Shouldn't you use a "real" dash instead of a hyphen? ;-)

content: "\2013 " attr(title) ;

Not sure if it should be an en dash with space or an em dash without. I'm sure
one of the typography cognoscenti will take a break from the thread on dashes to
fill us in. :-)

--
Steve

Dignity does not consist in possessing honours, but in deserving them.
-Aristotle

[Andreas Prilop]

"Steve Fulton" <ce********@hotmail.com> wrote:

Shouldn't you use a "real" dash instead of a hyphen? ;-)
content: "\2013 " attr(title) ;
Not sure if it should be an en dash with space or an em dash without. I'm sure
one of the typography cognoscenti will take a break from the thread on dashes to
fill us in. :-)

U+2015 quotation dash

[Steve Fulton]

Andreas Prilop wrote:

"Steve Fulton" <ce********@hotmail.com> wrote:

Shouldn't you use a "real" dash instead of a hyphen? ;-)
content: "\2013 " attr(title) ;
Not sure if it should be an en dash with space or an em dash without. I'm
sure one of the typography cognoscenti will take a break from the thread on
dashes to fill us in. :-)

U+2015 quotation dash

Ah, I should have looked through my Unicode charts instead of the HTML entities
chart. :-)

--
Steve

You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long.
-Boris Yeltsin

[Andreas Prilop]

ti**@greytower.net (Tina Holmboe) wrote:

What happens to that quotation dash if the UA doesn't handle Unicode ?

What happens to en-dash and em-dash if the UA doesn't handle Unicode?

The quotation dash (horizontal bar) U+2015 is included in ISO-8859-7,
MacGreek, & WGL4 http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/wgl4e.htm .
So it's nothing "fancy".

--
Meanwhile at the Google Ranch ...
"I can't read this bloody site; it's all Falsh and JavaScrap."
"Forget it and move on! Still 2*718*281*828 pages to crawl."

[Tina Holmboe]

Andreas Prilop <nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de> exclaimed in <160820031918566090%nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de>:

ti**@greytower.net (Tina Holmboe) wrote:

What happens to that quotation dash if the UA doesn't handle Unicode ?

What happens to en-dash and em-dash if the UA doesn't handle Unicode?

Why do you think I asked ? Hint: I'd really like to know. Does anyone
else actually know the answer ?

--
- Tina Holmboe Greytower Technologies
ti**@greytower.net http://www.greytower.net/
[+46] 0708 557 905

[Andreas Prilop]

ti**@greytower.net (Tina Holmboe) wrote:

What happens to that quotation dash if the UA doesn't handle Unicode ?
What happens to en-dash and em-dash if the UA doesn't handle Unicode?

Why do you think I asked ? Hint: I'd really like to know.

Sorry. I just wanted to say that the horizontal bar or quotation dash
behaves similar as en-dash and em-dash.
Does anyone else actually know the answer ?

Has been discussed here many times.
Netscape 4 (with certain restrictions) and Internet Explorer 4 will
display &#number; expressions as long as the characters are actually
available in fonts. Older browsers such as Netscape 3 will usually
display a question mark for &#number; if number > 255.

[Tina Holmboe]

Andreas Prilop <nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de> exclaimed in <160820032002451007%nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de>:

Netscape 4 (with certain restrictions) and Internet Explorer 4 will
display &#number; expressions as long as the characters are actually
available in fonts. Older browsers such as Netscape 3 will usually
display a question mark for &#number; if number > 255.

Lynx ? iSpider ? JAWS ? What does a screen reader, speech browsers, or
braille system actually do to such characters with and without support
for the specific character encoding ?

Can a Braille browser even be said to "support Unicode" ? Is there any
particular way to speak a quotation dash, as opposed to a hyphen ?

--
- Tina Holmboe Greytower Technologies
ti**@greytower.net http://www.greytower.net/
[+46] 0708 557 905

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Sat, Aug 16, Tina Holmboe inscribed on the eternal scroll:

What happens to that quotation dash if the UA doesn't handle Unicode ?

What happens to en-dash and em-dash if the UA doesn't handle Unicode?

Why do you think I asked ? Hint: I'd really like to know. Does anyone
else actually know the answer ?

What do you mean, "the" answer? A client agent which doesn't support
Unicode will do whatever it does, and there would be all kinds of
possibilities.

In the past, I've seen one which printed whichever iso-8859-1
character happened to be at the position of the (unicode character
modulo 256). And others which do different - and not very useful -
things. On the other hand, I've seen a browser that didn't support
any Unicode encoding, but nevertheless understood those Unicode
&#number; values which corresponded to Windows-1252 characters and
successfully displayed those (hmm, I think that was an old version of
Opera for Windows, BICBW).

[Andreas Prilop]

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jk******@cs.tut.fi> wrote:

More realistically, a browser may fail to display some characters. As a
practical matter, this is far more probable for quotation dash than for em
dash or en dash.

As I wrote earlier in this thread, the WGL4 set of MS Windows does
include the horizontal bar or quotation dash. If your browser can display
ᾰ — then it can also display ― .

Unix ISO-8859-7 fonts also include the horizontal bar or quotation dash.
But no Unix ISO-8859-x font includes en-dash or em-dash.

The MacGreek character set also includes the horizontal bar.

[Tina Holmboe]

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@mail.cern.ch> exclaimed in <Pi*******************************@lxplus076.cern. ch>:

> What happens to en-dash and em-dash if the UA doesn't handle Unicode?

Why do you think I asked ? Hint: I'd really like to know. Does anyone
else actually know the answer ?

What do you mean, "the" answer? A client agent which doesn't support
Unicode will do whatever it does, and there would be all kinds of
possibilities.

I'll try another question then. Does using a character from Unicode
versus one from ISO-8859-* or even ASCII give a higher or lower
probability of said character (a) not being presented to the user,
(b) being presented to the user as a place-holding glyph, or (c) presented
to the user as an entirely different character ?

From the rest of your answer it would seem that "Higher" would be right.

--
- Tina Holmboe Greytower Technologies
ti**@greytower.net http://www.greytower.net/
[+46] 0708 557 905

[Tina Holmboe]

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jk******@cs.tut.fi> exclaimed in <Xn*****************************@193.229.0.31>:

What happens to en-dash and em-dash if the UA doesn't handle Unicode?
Why do you think I asked ? Hint: I'd really like to know. Does
anyone else actually know the answer ?

If you mean that a UA doesn't handle Unicode at all, then it's basically
broken and not really an HTML browser at all (since HTML specifications
imply Unicode support). So anything may happen.

We live, constantly, with user agents which are not conformant. This fact
does nothing to help users if the information sent is not received.

More realistically, a browser may fail to display some characters. As a
practical matter, this is far more probable for quotation dash than for em
dash or en dash.
style sheet(s), or (gasp!) <font> tags. In there's no glyph for the
character there, they might display a small rectangle, or a question mark,
or something else.

Then it is a problem. A practical solution needs to be found. Thankyou
for your information.

--
- Tina Holmboe Greytower Technologies
ti**@greytower.net http://www.greytower.net/
[+46] 0708 557 905

[Andreas Prilop]

ti**@greytower.net (Tina Holmboe) wrote:

Older browsers such as Netscape 3 will usually
display a question mark for &#number; if number > 255.
Lynx ?

Does a pretty good job.
What does a screen reader, speech browsers, or
braille system actually do to such characters with and without support
for the specific character encoding ?
Can a Braille browser even be said to "support Unicode" ?
Braille script isn't restricted to the Latin alphabet:
<http://google.com/search?ie=ISO-8859-5&oe=UTF-8&q=%D1%E0%D0%D9%DB%EF>
Is there any
particular way to speak a quotation dash, as opposed to a hyphen ?

You do not pronounce hyphens, commas, periods, do you?

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Andreas Prilop <nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de> wrote:

Shouldn't you use a "real" dash instead of a hyphen? ;-)
content: "\2013 " attr(title) ;
Not sure if it should be an en dash with space or an em dash without.
I'm sure one of the typography cognoscenti will take a break from the
thread on dashes to fill us in. :-)

U+2015 quotation dash

"U+2015 - - is used to introduce quoted text in some typographic styles.",
says the Unicode standard. The way I see it, this means that it precedes
the quotation, not the citation (indication of source).

I must admit that I have never seen any typographic recommendation on
quotation dash, or anything that I would recognize as actual use of that
character. But I would expect it to be a very long dash, partly because
the sample glyph in the Unicode code chart is rather long, and partly
because UAX#14: Line Breaking Properties,
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/
describes: "Pairs of em dashes are sometimes used instead of a single
quotation dash." (It presents this as a reason to the special rule that
forbids a line break between em dashes - a rule that I had missed, and so
had the authors of Internet Explorer).

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Andreas Prilop]

ti**@greytower.net (Tina Holmboe) wrote:

I'll try another question then. Does using a character from Unicode
versus one from ISO-8859-* or even ASCII give a higher or lower
probability of said character (a) not being presented to the user,
(b) being presented to the user as a place-holding glyph,

The default installation of Internet Explorer under MS Windows will
happily display Cyrillic and Greek text in UTF-8 but fails on both
ISO-8859-5 and ISO-8859-7. You need to install additional tables for
ISO-8859-x. Bah!

[Nick Theodorakis]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 20:31:56 +0200, Andreas Prilop
<nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de> wrote:

ti**@greytower.net (Tina Holmboe) wrote:

[...]

Is there any
particular way to speak a quotation dash, as opposed to a hyphen ?

You do not pronounce hyphens, commas, periods, do you?

Only if the "lang" attribute is set to "Borge, Victor."

Nick

--
Nick Theodorakis
ni******************@urmc.rochester.edu

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Sat, Aug 16, Tina Holmboe inscribed on the eternal scroll:

Lynx ?

Lynx itself (at least in any halfways recent version) is no problem at
all. The problem, if their is one, would be the inability of one's
terminal emulation to handle the required characters.

If you've got a Unicode-capable terminal then you tell it so, and the
results are excellent (modulo the fact that it's a monospaced
display).

Users of Lynx are supposed to tell the browser (via the
display-charset option) what kind of character handling their terminal
will cope with, and then Lynx does its best to adapt (i.e if you tell
it the terminal is iso-8859-1 then it'll display all kinds of dash as
the ascii hyphen-minus, whereas if you tell it the terminal is
Windows-1252 then it'll use that repertoire instead).

[Andreas Prilop]

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@mail.cern.ch> wrote:

(I think you meant –, rather than "GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH
VRACHY", but not to worry. ;-)

Don't even know what a "vrachy" is. A quarter drachma? :-)

[Andreas Prilop]

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jk******@cs.tut.fi> wrote:

What if "international support" has not been installed, as
the situation is far too often? The em dash and en dash belong to
Windows Latin 1, the quotation dash does not.

Well, no luck then.

[Stan Brown]

In article <16*************************@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de>
in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Andreas Prilop
<nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de> wrote:

You do not pronounce hyphens, commas, periods, do you?

How do you pronounce "version 3.2" or "uni-hannover.de"?

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Stan Brown]

In article <Pi*******************************@lxplus076.cern. ch> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Alan J. Flavell
<fl*****@mail.cern.ch> wrote:

On Sat, Aug 16, Andreas Prilop inscribed on the eternal scroll:

If your browser can display
ᾰ — then it can also display ― .

Even if that's _often_ true, I'd have to rate it as inaccurate. As I
said in another posting, I've seen at least one browser/version that
worked in 8-bit-only using Windows-1252, and that understood
specifically those &#number; Unicode values which corresponded to the
Windows-1252 area 0x80 - 0x9F.

Netscape 4 under Windows 98, for one. It would handle em dash and en
dash and that's about it. (Now, thanks to help from Alan Flavell
among others, it handles all the Unicode I've got in fonts.)

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Andreas Prilop]

Stan Brown <th************@fastmail.fm> wrote:

How do you pronounce "version 3.2" or "uni-hannover.de"?

version drei zwei
uni hannover de e

[Stan Brown]

In article <Xn*****************************@193.229.0.31> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Jukka K. Korpela
<jk******@cs.tut.fi> wrote:

"U+2015 - - is used to introduce quoted text in some typographic styles.",
says the Unicode standard. The way I see it, this means that it precedes
the quotation, not the citation (indication of source).

I must admit that I have never seen any typographic recommendation on
quotation dash, or anything that I would recognize as actual use of that
character.

That sounds like what I have seen in French books, if my memory is
correct. When speakers alternate in a conversation, sometimes I
would see
-- Est-ce qu'il vient?
-- Oui.
-- Quand?
-- Je ne sais.
and so forth -- no quotation marks or guillemets, but a long dash
(which I have indicated with two hyphens) indicating the change of
speaker.

Again, this is from memory, so take it with a grain of salt. Can any
folks with actual French books confirm it, or am I all wet?

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Andreas Prilop]

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@mail.cern.ch> wrote:

Don't even know what a "vrachy" is.

Me too neither; I was simply quoting from the Unicode database.

It struck me that this is a modern Greek romanization instead of the
commoner "brach-", such as "brachistochrone".

[Andreas Prilop]

Stan Brown <th************@fastmail.fm> wrote:

When speakers alternate in a conversation, sometimes I
would see
-- Est-ce qu'il vient?
-- Oui.
-- Quand?
-- Je ne sais.
Again, this is from memory, so take it with a grain of salt. Can any
folks with actual French books confirm it, or am I all wet?

This form is used in Russian, too.

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Sat, Aug 16, Tina Holmboe inscribed on the eternal scroll:

I'll try another question then. Does using a character from Unicode
versus one from ISO-8859-* or even ASCII give a higher or lower
probability of said character (a) not being presented to the user,
(b) being presented to the user as a place-holding glyph, or (c) presented
to the user as an entirely different character ?

From the rest of your answer it would seem that "Higher" would be right.

I'd go along with "somewhat higher", and refer you to what I said at
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...t.html#NoteWin

Or to put it another way: sometimes your material may call
specifically for an extended character repertoire (say, Hebrew and
Greek together in a page on biblical studies) and then you just have
to require your readers to use a capable browser, and WebTV wouldn't
stand a chance. But when that kind of specialised requirement isn't
there, I'd say it's rather pointless to put your otherwise-
straightforward documents at risk by insisting on too many
typographical niceties.

But then, on the other hand if you are a typographer, or your work is
of a kind where typographic details are substantive to the content,
you'd obviously reach a different conclusion.

[Tina Holmboe]

Andreas Prilop <nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de> exclaimed in <160820032031565431%nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de>:

Is there any
particular way to speak a quotation dash, as opposed to a hyphen ?

You do not pronounce hyphens, commas, periods, do you?

Not usually, no. Shall I assume that there is no practical difference
between a hyphen and a quotation dash ?

--
- Tina Holmboe Greytower Technologies
ti**@greytower.net http://www.greytower.net/
[+46] 0708 557 905

[Tina Holmboe]

Andreas Prilop <nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de> exclaimed in <160820032111340629%nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de>:

Stan Brown <th************@fastmail.fm> wrote:

How do you pronounce "version 3.2" or "uni-hannover.de"?

version drei zwei
uni hannover de e

Then, depending on your audience, you would loose information. Agreed ?

Dictating letters is an experience in itself.

--
- Tina Holmboe Greytower Technologies
ti**@greytower.net http://www.greytower.net/
[+46] 0708 557 905

[Andreas Prilop]

ti**@greytower.net (Tina Holmboe) wrote:

You do not pronounce hyphens, commas, periods, do you?

Not usually, no. Shall I assume that there is no practical difference
between a hyphen and a quotation dash ?

No more than between a hyphen and a comma.

[Stan Brown]

In article <16*************************@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de>
in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Andreas Prilop
<nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de> wrote:

Stan Brown <th************@fastmail.fm> wrote:

How do you pronounce "version 3.2" or "uni-hannover.de"?

version drei zwei
uni hannover de e

Yeah, right.

And if you are reading either of those aloud to someone who will
write them down or type them, what do you think is the probability
that their rendition will match the original?

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Tim]

ti**@greytower.net (Tina Holmboe) wrote:

Is there any
particular way to speak a quotation dash, as opposed to a hyphen ?

Andreas Prilop <nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de> wrote:
You do not pronounce hyphens, commas, periods, do you?

On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 18:41:22 GMT,
ni******************@urmc.rochester.edu (Nick Theodorakis) wrote:
Only if the "lang" attribute is set to "Borge, Victor."

;-)

But you can configure speech synthesisers to read out punctuation,
symbols, etc. Though, I'm told, that most don't.

--
My "from" address is totally fake. (Hint: If I wanted e-mails from
complete strangers, I'd have put a real one, there.) Reply to usenet
postings in the same place as you read the message you're replying to.

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Sun, Aug 17, Tim inscribed on the eternal scroll:

But you can configure speech synthesisers to read out punctuation,
symbols, etc. Though, I'm told, that most don't.

The default configuration of IBM HPR certainly didn't read out
commas, periods etc. but used them to influence the way the content
was spoken. AFAIR there was an option to speak them out explicitly
if wished.

However, it certainly did read | as "BAR", and [ as LEFT SQUARE
BRACKET, and so on (it read them rather loudly!). I didn't find any
global option to turn that off, though certainly there was a
comprehensive user-dictionary to apply one's own readings to pretty
much anything, whether it be a word, an abbreviation, or even a
punctuation character or group of characters.

OTOH, the user interface for setting those things in the speech module
was a nightmare even for a sighted user - I don't know how a blind
user would cope with _that_ aspect.

--
"If designers haven't done previous work for the web, they can come
to it with certain preconceptions." - Martin Tanton in uk.n.w.a
(a sample of the British art of understatement! -ed.)

[Tim]

On Sun, 17 Aug 2003 18:42:20 +0200,
"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@mail.cern.ch> wrote:

OTOH, the user interface for setting those things in the speech module
was a nightmare even for a sighted user - I don't know how a blind
user would cope with _that_ aspect.

Nothing unusual in that. Disability support is far from adequate, and
often only half-implemented.

--
My "from" address is totally fake. (Hint: If I wanted e-mails from
complete strangers, I'd have put a real one, there.) Reply to usenet
postings in the same place as you read the message you're replying to.