International quotes (Was: Markdown-Discuss Digest, Vol 25, Issue 6)

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Christoph Freitag <mail at christoph-freitag.de> [2005-10-22 20:40]:

> This selector could then even be triggered by some "code" in

> the parsed text.


That way lies madness.

If language is set from within the data, you get in funny
situations – even if you do the sane thing and allow only a
single language for an entire document. What do you do with
multiple language setting directives (f.ex. because multiple
source documents are combined before processing)? What about the
text at the beginning of a document if first directive appears
some way into the document instead of at the top? You don’t want
to support changing languages mid-stream – way too hairy. But any
rules you make about which directive gets precendence over the
others will lead to surprise/annoyance some of the time.

Language should be configured externally, not deduced in any
fashion from the data. That way, noone will even try to do
impossible things, and they will never get unexpected results,
because SmartyPants always does exactly as it was told and
nothing else.


> I don't think, however, that it is a good idea to mix different

> languages' styles in one document. I have never seen this in

> print, except in texts that wanted to show precisely these

> layout differences.


See above. There should be switchable language-specific defaults
which are always applied to an entire document. Most people will
never (need to) use anything else.


> I would strongly oppose using ?? or ,, or the like for

> different quotes. This has put me off in Latex -- and you never

> see it in emails.


Apparently the francophones do write << transliterated >>
French-style quote marks, at least occasionally.

But I agree that __*noone*__ writes German with quote marks in
ASCII ,,like this``.

I don’t see the harm in having transliterations available. They
would be useful when you really want to do something that the
language settings would not allow. SmartyPants would just be
useless to germanophones if they *had* to use these.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>