[dokuwiki] Re: pending patches?

Sander Tekelenburg wrote:

At 14:53 +0100 UTC, on 2007-01-18, Werner Flamme wrote:

Martin Tschofen schrieb am 18.01.2007 13:37:



if you use <q> and <blockquote> (which
are the semantically appropriate tags) to quote text in html. Then with css
you should be able to change the appearance of the quotes. If you're
thinking about using various different quote characters for the same
language, that wouldn't do it of course...martin



Well, that depends on what sort of variation you're thinking about. CSS
allows you to define different quote characters for each level of quotation.
If that's not what you mean to achieve, there's always <span class="blah">...



I know that. But when the generated (X)HTMLcode has no special tags (like q
or blockquote or cite or whatever) around the passages, I do not see what
this css code helps for me.



Well, if the text in question is in fact a quote (and why else would you use
quote characters), the proper mark-up would be to use <q> or <blockquote>. If
you're saying those elements aren't there, then I'd say *that* is the problem.
I disagree. Normally, I am all for semantics, but in this case the starting point is simply wrong: Quotation marks are *not only* used for quotes! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark lists a few such cases (and I think, there must be more): 
Irony -> My brother claimed he was too "busy" to help me.
Use-mention distinction -> "Cheese" is derived from a word in Old English.
Titles of artistic works -> David Bowie's "Space Oddity"
Nicknames and false titles -> Nat "King" Cole
In all those cases a surrounding <q></q> would be very far from being semantically correct. (Let alone the fact that the opinions of the <q> tag are quite controversial, see http://alistapart.com/comments/qtag/ or http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/14/the_q_tag_revisited.) 


I do recognise that Dokuwiki's inline editor doesn't offer buttons to
generate such mark-up, so you'd have to allow raw HTML to be entered. (Or
perhaps it can be done with markdown, which I believe Dokuwiki supports.)


Maybe a markup for inline quotes are missing? Would it be used??


Still, IMO it would be better to not have hard-coded quote characters in your
content, but to instead enter proper mark-up, and leave the presentational
aspect to CSS. The reason for this is that user-agents can then apply the
proper quote characters themselves (through their built-in Style Sheet), and
users can override with whatever they consider to be correct quote
characters. After all, not everybody agrees on exactly which quote characters
are 'right' for a given language.
Unless you can "guess" (here again! ;-) ) the kind of quotation mark usage in a text, it makes no sense to *always* use <q> ... 


Anika
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