Carlo wrote:
Marcello wrote
Steve Thomas wrote:
The common advice seems to be to use <q> to enclose quoted speech *inline*, and use <quote> for quoting larger blocks of text. The P4 TEI manual was a bit vague on this, but that seems to be a sensible convention worth using.
That would be presentational markup and very against the TEI specs. The specs are very detailed on this:
If TEI has to be used only semantically, then it is inadequate for PG needs. PG markup has to contain presentational elements, in such a way that one can obtain presentations "faithful to the original".
Is this a requirement that it be possible *without some manual work* to regenerate the typographic layout of the source document? And what impact does this attempt to be 'faithful to the original' have on accessibility and non-visual uses of the PG texts?
A PG-TEI encoded text should allow to call a transform to a presentation form with an "original" formatting specification, allowing to recover whatever was in the original, (as well as other specifications allowing to change it). This might include, (referring to quotations), the possibility of rendering a quoted section with running quotation marks at the start of each line.
This implies, for example, that "long-s" characters, common in pre-19th century English texts, should be preserved (e.g., use the Unicode character equivalent). For modern usage someone can later transform all Unicode "long-s" characters to the ordinary "s". But to do it the other way around is more difficult. (Yes, a special character is not usually a "presentation" issue, but in this case it has become a modern presentation issue.)
One should never forget that presentation IS semantic: this is evident with heavily formatted poetry, (Mallarme's "Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hazard" is a quite extreme case) but in some form or another it is always true.
I disagree with this in a general sense. Presentation is most used to communicate document structure and sometimes the semantics of particular chunks of content (e.g., "this is a foreign phrase".) In a few cases visual layout becomes part of content itself ("poetry as visual art"). In these rare cases I believe that SVG should be used since there are facilities in SVG for accessibility, and SVG will truly get it exactly right all the time. SVG is XML-based, too. Jon Noring