Jeroen Hellingman wrote:
0. TEI is highly flexible, and prescribes fairly little. You choose what elements you wish to mark up and which not.
Yes. But *if* you mark up you have to use the right element. Using <quote> for all displayed quotes is wrong.
1. Quotations do not nest well with paragraphs. TEI (or XML) do not provide mechanisms to properly represent overlapping hierarchies. Older books can be quite difficult to mark up this way, as closing marks are often missing, etc. (I can provide examples)
I have marked up a lot of books with multi-paragraph quotations. I also have a script that replaces most quotation signs with <q> </q> and even gets <q rend="pre"> right most of the time. I found a lot of quotation mark errors in PG texts this way.
2. Quotation marks can be considered part of the content, and thus should be retained. Adding <q> elements to these parts is fully optional, and I would only provide these if I have a good reason to do so, as indicated in Marcello's mail. (and I would add, if you would like to create an aural style sheet, and have parts spoken by different voices, they also make sense, just as providing expantions of abbreviations, etc.!)
1. Quotation marks are just presentational markup for "this is a quote", no more than italic is presentational markup for "this is emphasized". You should retain the underlying semantic feature not the presentation. 2. Replacing quotation signs with <q> </q> will actually preserve them *better*. Unless you replace all apostroph chars with the correct lsquo and rsquo characters or entities, almost every output will look nearer to the original if the renderer can insert the correct unicode lsquo rsquo glyphs. (Note: its difficult for a renderer to guess from context if it should render apos as apos, lsquo or rsquo, but it is easy to transform <q> and </q>.) But *if* you replace apos with lsquo and rsquo you may as well replace it with <q> and </q>. But of course all this discussion is moot, because my converter supports both ways and you can do as you like.
3. Adding <q> to all quotations (even with help of a script) is labour intensive, and adds little value.
Not at all. The script finds most of these. The validator finds some more. Then you make a last pass in the editor with a regexp search. (Of course doing Mark Twain will take a little longer.) -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org