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: 6.3.3 Quotation This section discusses the following elements, all of which are often rendered by the use of quotation marks: * <q> contains a quotation or apparent quotation — a representation of speech or thought marked as being quoted from someone else (whether in fact quoted or not); in narrative, the words are usually those of of a character or speaker; in dictionaries, q may be used to mark real or contrived examples of usage. * <quote> contains a phrase or passage attributed by the narrator or author to some agency external to the text. * <cit> A quotation from some other document, together with a bibliographic reference to its source. * <soCalled> contains a word or phrase for which the author or narrator indicates a disclaiming of responsibility, for example by the use of scare quotes or italics. One form of presentational variation found particularly frequently in written and printed texts is the use of quotation marks. As with the typographic variations discussed in the preceding section, it is generally helpful to separate the encoding of the underlying textual feature (for example, a quotation or a piece of direct speech) from the encoding of its rendering (for example, the use of a particular style of quotation marks). The most common and important use of quotation marks is, of course, to mark quotation, by which we mean simply any part of the text attributed by the author or narrator to some agency other than the narrative voice. Typical examples include passages cited from other works, for which the element <quote> may be used, and words or phrases attributed to other voices within the current work, for which the element <q> may be used. If this distinction between intra-textual and inter-textual voices cannot be made reliably, or is not of interest, then all quoted matter may simply be marked using the <q> tag. The editorial policy in this respect should be stated in the encoding description of the TEI Header. The <soCalled> element is used for cases where the author or narrator distances him or herself from the words in question without however attributing them to any other voice in particular. http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/CO.html#COHQQ
As I understand this (from an earlier post), 'rend="display"' is supposed to mean that the block should be indented (rather like the HTML blockquote).
This seems like a very poor choice of terms to me. CSS has a "display" property, which can take values such as "inline", "block", and -- crucially -- "none". "display:none" is used where you don't want the content displayed at all.
So using this rend="display" seems likely to result in confusion.
In any case, the choice is poor because it does not convey the information desired. If you use <quote> on its own without rend="display", does that indicate you don't want to display the content? Or that you don't want to indent it?
"These Guidelines make no binding recommendations for the values of the rend attribute; the characteristics of visual presentation vary too much from text to text and the decision to record or ignore individual characteristics varies too much from project to project. Some potentially useful conventions are noted from time to time at appropriate points in the Guidelines." -- http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/ref-GLOBAL.html Thus we are perfectly right in making up a convention of our own. But TEI is not CSS. Although CSS and the rend attribute are both purely presentational we should not mix TEI and CSS conventions. The "display" choice may be poor but it is exactly the same choice Sebastian Rahtz made in his stylesheets. Look at the code in: http://www.tei-c.org/Stylesheets/P4/html/teihtml-misc.xsl While not dictated by TEI specs, using rend="display" makes our convention compatible with Sebastian's stylesheets. Also, using <q rend="block"> would be a still poorer choice because the rend attribute is global and can be used on all TEI elements. <div rend="block"> is perfectly valid TEI and it would be quite counter-intuitive to have it set a display margin around the block, whereas <div rend="display"> makes quite clear what you want.
This was thrashed out at great length almost a year ago. Basically, while purists will see enormous merit in using <q> instead of quote marks, the practical approach is to stick with the quote marks, due to reasons outlined by another poster. (The terminating quote question with muli-paragraph quotes.)
Using <q> has advantages: - automatically finds quotation mark errors - renderer can use prettiest quote in output format, eg. plain ugly apostrophe in TXT and pretty typografical quotes in PDF. - automatically extract quotes from text and disadvantages: - more work The argument about the terminating quote character in multi-paragraph quotes is moot since there is a way to deal with it: <p>He said: <q rend="pre">Blah.</q></p> <p><q>And blah.</q></p> -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org