Re: Can't find <open-quote>, <close-quote> characters in spec

Peter Flynn (pflynn@curia.ucc.ie)
Tue, 25 Oct 94 21:34:32 EDT

Where did we get to with a decision or not to support character entity
sets beyond ISOlat1 in HTML3?

These entity names are not defined in HTML 2.0. If we intend to
expand the character set of HTML to include such characters, it
makes sense to include the entities. But if we're just going
to map these names in to ISO8859-1 text strings, then I'd rather
not bother. I'd rather see folks write:

``a quote''
than
&rdquot;a quot&ldquot;

Definitely. But I suspect we may come under pressure from publishers
and their typographers or designers to support the full entity set so
that the "fine-line" distinctions between two `` separate quote
characters and the concept of "a double quote" can be preserved,
especially if (a) publishers start to make more use of other SGML.dtds
and/or (b) their concern for being able to guarantee appearance is to
be honored (some fonts do have a separately-designed double-quote).

///Peter