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Quoting wasn't discussed yet. It's not even clear yet whether we need it in Creole.

There are two kinds of quotes, similar to two kinds of preformatted text. Inline quotes are made in HTML with <q> tags, block quotes with <blockquote>. The traditional rendering of these elements is:

  • enclosing in (localized) quote characters in case of <q> (not supported by MSIE)
  • indenting in case of <blockquote>>> (some e-mail readers also add a vertical bar along the text)

It would be good to allow specifying an (optional) source of the quotation, either in form of an URI, or just a comment containing title or other reference.

I'm not sure if this is really needed in Creole. Personally I use the inline quotes a lot in my blog-wiki, but that's just my personal style. One could use italics instead.

I use ,, to open the quote, and '' to close it, but maybe markup similar to the preformatted text markup, like """ could be used (with similar rules as to whether it's block or inline). A link immediatelly following the quote (without any whitespace or punctuation) could be used as source indication. Thus:

This is smaple paragraph. It conatins """an inline quote""". There
is also a block quote below it:

"""
This is a block quote.

This is a second paragraph of it.
"""[[http://my.quotes/blockquote|taken from my quotes]]

Yes, " is supposed to be not used. But it fits so well... -- RadomirDopieralski, 2006-09-22


Interesting idea, Radomir, as it resembles preformatted text and allows both inline and block quotes. I also like the idea of associating a "source" to a quote, better if not necessarily a link. But using " chararacters could create problems, as they're often converted to curly quotes in word processors.

From my personal point of view, quotes are fundamental. My target is more about forums and discussions than real wikis. But, after all, wouldn't a standard wiki syntax be great for those, also?

OLPC and Markdown have blockquotes, and they use >, too. Unfortunately, http://www.wikimatrix.org doesn't help to compare quote syntaxes.

-- MicheleTomaiuolo, 2006-09-22

This seems to be the most widespread and traditional use:

> This is a block quote.
> Every line of it begins with one or more > characters.
>
> Paragraphs within it are separated with lines containing only the > characters and whitespace. Long lines wrap around making it hard to see where the quote ends.
> * Should lists also be supported inside quotes?
>> How about quotes inside quotes?
> -- Source can be indicated with standard e-mail signature mark.

> Empty line marks end of blockquote and beginning of a next one.

-- RadomirDopieralski, 2006-09-22


The e-mail style is not the fastest to type, but it's a well extabilished rule not only in emails but also in other text-based documents.

I can notice that prefixing signatures with two '-' signs is a widespread practice, and in my opinion it should be formalized. It approximates quite closely the semantics of the HTML ADDRESS element. Mozilla suggests to use ADDRESS in quotations, too: http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/writing/markup#quotations

The example above is interpreted correctly by the experimental Text_Wiki_Creole parser. See my page.

-- MicheleTomaiuolo, 2006-09-25

I also know quite a lot of wikis use a colon instead of a greater than sign to show indention as the following:

: This is a block quote.
: Every line of it begins with one or more : characters.
:
: Paragraphs within it are separated with lines containing only the : characters and whitespace. Long lines wrap around making it hard to see where the quote ends.
: * Should lists also be supported inside quotes?
:: How about quotes inside quotes?
: -- Source can be indicated with standard e-mail signature mark.

: Empty line marks end of blockquote and beginning of a next one.

-- Anonymus


I'd like bring this topic back, as we probably need quoting. It's probably good to have both inline and block quotes. The fact that MSIE incorrectly ignores the <q> tags has nothing to do with it -- after all, there are many ways to actually render the quotes (see http://www.alistapart.com/articles/qtag/), and one doesn't even have to use HTML.

For inline quotes, we have four options:

  • Try to detect quotes based on position of the characters and groups of characters commonly used for quoting, like "`", """, "''", ",,", ">>", "`", "``", "<<", etc. This is tricky even in normal text, especially when "'" is involved. It's even harder for jargon text that can contain various additional code (the code should be theoretically always contained in nowiki markup, but that's not always practiced). For example: "quote", 'quote', `quote', ''quote'', ,,quote'', >>quote<<, <<quote>>, ``quote'', etc.
  • Use formally defined markup for the quotes, resembling the one used traditionally, but more restricted, to ease parsing. For example, I use ,,quote'' on my wiki. This has a problem, as most of the "traditional" quoting characters are not supposed to be used in Creole for markup (see Terms).
  • Use whatever markup is used for block quotes, the same way that preformated blocks and nowiki share markup, for example [[[quote]]].
  • Use formally defined, yet artifical markup, for example ~~quote~~ .

For block quotes, we have basically two possible approaches:

  • Use a "leading" character or indentation on every line of the quoted text. This is especially known in e-mails, with the ">" or ":" characters, or a combination of them. Normally, the amount of characters signifies the nesting level of the quote, similar to lists in Creole. I don't think we need multilevel block quotes.
  • Use a parenthesis-like syntax, similar to preformatted blocks in Creole. This makes it much easier to quote long texts, and also to adjust the line length of the pasted text.

I'm pretty confused as to what criteria should be considered most important when choosing markup for quotes. I don't know of any wiki engine that has markup for inline quotes by default. The block quote syntax present in some wiki engines is usually abused to form threaded discussions instead of quoting.

Any ideas?

-- RadomirDopieralski, 2006-12-30

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« This particular version was published on 30-Dez-2006 01:02 by RadomirDopieralski.