Right way to quote

[Tina Holmboe]

Re: Right way to quote

"Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@mail.c ern.ch> exclaimed in <Pine.LNX.4.53. 0308161952490.1 7948@lxplus076. cern.ch>:
[color=blue][color=green][color=darkred]
>> > What happens to en-dash and em-dash if the UA doesn't handle Unicode?[/color]
>>
>> Why do you think I asked ? Hint: I'd really like to know. Does anyone
>> else actually know the answer ?[/color]
>
> 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.[/color]

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
tina@greytower. net http://www.greytower.net/
[+46] 0708 557 905

[Tina Holmboe]

Re: Right way to quote

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tu t.fi> exclaimed in <Xns93D9D7006F5 2Ejkorpelacstut fi@193.229.0.31 >:
[color=blue][color=green][color=darkred]
>>> What happens to en-dash and em-dash if the UA doesn't handle Unicode?[/color]
>>
>> Why do you think I asked ? Hint: I'd really like to know. Does
>> anyone else actually know the answer ?[/color]
>
> 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.[/color]

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



[color=blue]
> 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.[/color]

[color=blue]
> 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.[/color]

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

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

[Andreas Prilop]

Re: Right way to quote

tina@greytower. net (Tina Holmboe) wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> Older browsers such as Netscape 3 will usually
>> display a question mark for &#number; if number > 255.[/color]
>
> Lynx ?[/color]

Does a pretty good job.
[color=blue]
> 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" ?[/color]

Braille script isn't restricted to the Latin alphabet:
<http://google.com/search?ie=ISO-8859-5&oe=UTF-8&q=%D1%E0%D0%D 9%DB%EF>
[color=blue]
> Is there any
> particular way to speak a quotation dash, as opposed to a hyphen ?[/color]

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

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Re: Right way to quote

Andreas Prilop <nhtcapri@rrz n-user.uni-hannover.de> wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> 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. :-)[/color]
>
> U+2015 quotation dash[/color]

"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]

Re: Right way to quote

tina@greytower. net (Tina Holmboe) wrote:
[color=blue]
> 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,[/color]

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]

Re: Right way to quote

On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 20:31:56 +0200, Andreas Prilop
<nhtcapri@rrz n-user.uni-hannover.de> wrote:
[color=blue]
>tina@greytower .net (Tina Holmboe) wrote:
>[/color]
[...]
[color=blue][color=green]
>> Is there any
>> particular way to speak a quotation dash, as opposed to a hyphen ?[/color]
>
>You do not pronounce hyphens, commas, periods, do you?[/color]


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

Nick

--
Nick Theodorakis
nicholas_theodo rakis@urmc.roch ester.edu

[Alan J. Flavell]

Re: Right way to quote

On Sat, Aug 16, Tina Holmboe inscribed on the eternal scroll:
[color=blue]
> Lynx ?[/color]

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]

Re: Right way to quote

"Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@mail.c ern.ch> wrote:
[color=blue]
> (I think you meant –, rather than "GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH
> VRACHY", but not to worry. ;-)[/color]

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

[Andreas Prilop]

Re: Right way to quote

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tu t.fi> wrote:
[color=blue]
> What if "internatio nal 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.[/color]

Well, no luck then.

[Stan Brown]

Re: Right way to quote

In article <16082003203156 5431%nhtcapri@r rzn-user.uni-hannover.de>
in comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.html, Andreas Prilop
<nhtcapri@rrz n-user.uni-hannover.de> wrote:[color=blue]
>You do not pronounce hyphens, commas, periods, do you?[/color]

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]

Re: Right way to quote

In article <Pine.LNX.4.53. 0308162032290.1 7948@lxplus076. cern.ch> in
comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.html, Alan J. Flavell
<flavell@mail.c ern.ch> wrote:[color=blue]
>On Sat, Aug 16, Andreas Prilop inscribed on the eternal scroll:
>[color=green]
>> If your browser can display
>> ᾰ — then it can also display ― .[/color]
>
>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.[/color]

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]

Re: Right way to quote

Stan Brown <the_stan_brown @fastmail.fm> wrote:
[color=blue]
> How do you pronounce "version 3.2" or "uni-hannover.de"?[/color]

version drei zwei
uni hannover de e

[Stan Brown]

Re: Right way to quote

In article <Xns93D9DB5E58C F9jkorpelacstut fi@193.229.0.31 > in
comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.html, Jukka K. Korpela
<jkorpela@cs.tu t.fi> wrote:[color=blue]
>"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.[/color]

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]

Re: Right way to quote

"Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@mail.c ern.ch> wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> Don't even know what a "vrachy" is.[/color]
>
> Me too neither; I was simply quoting from the Unicode database.[/color]

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

[Andreas Prilop]

Re: Right way to quote

Stan Brown <the_stan_brown @fastmail.fm> wrote:
[color=blue]
> 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?[/color]

This form is used in Russian, too.