Marcello Perathoner 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:
I do not agree with this, especially not in the context of pre-existing books, for a number of reasons. 0. TEI is highly flexible, and prescribes fairly little. You choose what elements you wish to mark up and which not. 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) 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.!) 3. Adding <q> to all quotations (even with help of a script) is labour intensive, and adds little value.
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>
And you will need a very smart renderer to correctly supply them, leave the quotation marks intact (inside or outside the <q>) or provide cumbersome rend attributes.