Re: suggestions on how to markup quotes in article?

Helmut Richter schreef:
On Fri, 12 Dec 2008, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

Hendrik Maryns wrote:

[...] I think it is a very unfortunate decision
in Unicode that U+2019 says

RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
this is the preferred character to use for apostrophe

These two concepts should be separate, because they are semantically
different, although the glyph might be the same.

You're not alone with such ideas, but this was a decision made after long
consideration, and it is related to the principle of encoding characters, not
ideas.

Then, with exactly the same justification, one should have unified the
identically-looking characters U+002C (COMMA) and U+201A (SINGLE LOW-9
QUOTATION MARK) as well.

I think, a normally pairwise-used quote mark should not be mixed up with a
single punctuation for a very different purpose just because the glyph
designer has the option to render them identically -- without that being a
requirement for a correct design.

I say this while opposing different characters for characters that are
always identical and only semantically different.


Indeed. Another argument to this point: an apostrophe is part of a word
and should therefore be jumped over when navigating with the keyboard:
if I write aren’t and hit Ctrl+Left at the a, I want my cursor to land
after the t. This is easy here, because the apostrophe is surrounded by
letters, but what with ’t, ’n, ’k ’s (common in Dutch) and I suppose
there are cases where the apostrophe comes at the end. To the contrary,
the quote sign should always be at the end of a word, so usually be
followed by a space, but maybe punctuation. It requires other behavior.
In short: these signs belong in different semantic classes. I think
that counts as a good reason to distinguish them.

H.

--
Hendrik Maryns
http://tcl.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~hendrik/
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