Time to ™ up

[Jonathan Snook]

Witty subject aside, I have an issue... shouldn't ™ or it's numerical
equivilent ™ be language independent? Such that if the language of the
document is set to "fr" it would be the MC instead of the TM? Or is there a
french equivilent that I'm not familiar with?

Jonathan

[Andreas Prilop]

"Jonathan Snook" <go****************@snook.ca> wrote:

Witty subject aside, I have an issue... shouldn't &trade; or it's numerical
equivilent ™ be language independent?
Not only should it - it is. Certain paired characters such as ( ) [ ]
are DIR dependent, but none is LANG dependent.
Such that if the language of the
document is set to "fr" it would be the MC instead of the TM?

Non.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

"Jonathan Snook" <go****************@snook.ca> wrote:

shouldn't &trade; or it's numerical
equivilent ™ be language independent?
It is by definition language independent, but not in the sense you
mean.
Such that if the
language of the document is set to "fr" it would be the MC instead
of the TM?

No, it is language independent in the sense that the character is the
same independently of the language context, just as the copyright sign,
registered sign, and at sign are. It can be _pronounced_ differently,
though.

The Unicode standard defines the trade mark sign as a compatibility
character, which is compatibility equivalent to TM in superscript
style, i.e. ^TM to use HTML notation. This does not imply,
however, that the rendering of ⁚ must be the same as that of
^TM - variation in style is possible.

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

[Jonathan Snook]

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

No, it is language independent in the sense that the character is the
same independently of the language context, just as the copyright sign,
registered sign, and at sign are. It can be _pronounced_ differently,
though.

The problem with the TM sign is that in french it's not a TM, it's an MC. My
assumption would be that each language would or could have it's own
trademark symbol. Of course it'd be pronounced differently, it'd be a
different word in each language. The copyright sign, registered sign, and at
sign, in my mind, are different in that the characters are (presumably)
universal.

So, when I work on a French page and I need to put a French "droit d'auteur"
(copyright), I can do &copy;. But when I want to do a trademark, I have to
use ^MC and cannot use &trade;.

I know there's really no way around it. Just talking semantics. :)

Jonathan
--
http://www.snook.ca/

[Jukka K. Korpela]

"Jonathan Snook" <go***************@snook.ca> wrote:

My assumption would be that each language would or could
have it's own trade mark symbol.
The idea behind the trademark symbol is that it is universal.
The
copyright sign, registered sign, and at sign, in my mind, are
different in that the characters are (presumably) universal.
Not really any more universal than the trade mark symbol. It all
depends on what characters people use.
So, when I work on a French page and I need to put a French "droit
d'auteur" (copyright), I can do &copy;. But when I want to do a
trademark, I have to use ^MC and cannot use &trade;.

Well, maybe, if MC is the practice in French. Of course you cannot use
&trade; unless you mean the TM character.

In theory, entities (such as &trade;) were introduced into SGML to
allow macro-like notations that will be replaced by different strings
in different circumstances. But HTML took a simplistic view on this and
only uses entities that expand to fixed character references.

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

[Andreas Prilop]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

The idea behind the trademark symbol is that it is universal.

The "registered trademark sign" ® should be universal.
But I doubt whether the "trademark sign" TM has any legal meaning
outside North America.