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
My personal preferences:
- Do not specify markup for inline quotes.
- Use one or more colons at the beginning of a paragraph to indicate that the paragraph is an indented block, number of colons equals nesting level.
My personal feeling is that Wiki markup has a little more of a presentation flavor to it than HTML, certainly the vision of HTML espoused by the W3C. I consider that a good thing, and do not agree with those who feel that markup indicating semantics is always superior to presentation markup.
HTML4 has em, cite, var, and address, all of which render as italics by default in Safari (as does <i>, of course). There are other semantic meanings of italics than what's in the HTML list, such as marking foreign phrases. I don't think it's a great idea to expect a markup language, especially one intended for Wikis, to cover all possible semantic meanings. Of course, treating the markup as having presentation meaning has no such difficulties. On a Wiki, I'd fully expect Plugin insertion failed: Image plugin requires the name of an image and cannot be empty. to be used for all these applications, whether emphasis is intended or not. In practice, <em> is a synonym for <i>, and the Principle of Least Surprise would be violated if it weren't.
The same goes for indented blocks. There are many uses for such things other than block quotations, including, as Radomir points out, indicating threading structure. There would be no need to "abuse" blockquote for this purpose if there were an indented-block tag with semantics indicating thread structure, but again, experience shows that markup languages can't really cover all possible semantic bases.
Markdown's use of '>' on every line is clever, as it is fully consistent with email, and makes the indentation very clear when reading the raw text, but I think it lacks in the usability department, especially as many editing contexts don't make the distinction between hard and soft newline explicit, and confusion about this will almost inevitably lead to unexpected markup characters leaking into the text. My vote is for ':' to distinguish it from Markdown-style quoting, and also to follow the example of OddMuse.
Another related question is whether we should support curly quotes. If so, I don't think following the example of the HTML <q> tag is the best way to do it. One possibility is to follow LaTeX and interpret two backticks as an open curly double quote, and two apostrophes as a close double curly quote. Note that single quotes should also be treated the same way. To get the ASCII versions, use preformatted or (if separately available) nowiki markup.
But, much as it pains me (I come from a typography background), I'm not going to recommend this for core Creole. My guess is that it's likely to cause problems for unsophisticated users, and that's an ungoal that is probably more important than the gain in typographic sophistication. The preferred method for getting curly quotes in Barghest will thus be Unicode, and client-side markup editors are encouraged to support that as a pseudo input method the same way most word processors today do.
The discussion on the SmartyPants webpage is probably of interest here. Note that they implement backslash substitution to force "non-smart" punctuation. Their double-backslash syntax (for escaping a single backslash) would be a collision for the proposed linebreak syntax, and in general backslash-escapes strike me as unWikiLike.
-- Raph Levien, 31 Dec 2006
Of course both semantics and presentation have their place. Obviously, you want to use presentational markup (or even better, just WYSIWYG editor) in any kind of a desktop publishing, typesetting or graphical software for a printshop. Especially if you have graphical skills and experience with typography.
On the other hand, if you're a writer, this is all additional work for you. Work, that is better delegated to the responsible professionals, like typesetters or web designers. Why should you be burdened with "beautifying" your text to make it readable, when this can be done automatically?
Another advantage of semantic markup is its portability. The "literal" new lines are a good example here -- they make it impossible to adapt the text to a different page width. Note, how you can always convert from semantic markup to presentational (actually, it's done every time the text is displayed), while it's impossible to do it the other way around.
Certainly, we don't want to duplicate HTML, nor we dream to cover all the possible meanings of text. On the other hand, we also don't want to duplicate PostScript or TeX, which are page-description languages. What we aim for is a healthy balance that leaves the least number of worries on the editor's head, while providing him with enough expressive power.
Of course, the definition of "enough" will change from a wiki site to a wiki site, and certainly is totally different for a content management system like your Barghest. That's why we want to provide the minimum, and let it be extended when needed. That's how we don't need to cover all possible semantic meanings. If we wanted to go presentational, we could simply just put all the enterd text in a large "<pre>" tag, with some additional rules for substituting "*" for bullets and changing fonts.
Quoting text is a very important thing in wikis, and I'm sure it deserves its own markup. I don't mean the "thread mode" here or quoting in a discussion -- I mean quoting other sources than the wiki site on which the quote appears. Currently, it's incredibly clumsy in all the text markup languages I know -- including HTML and all wiki markups I had contact with.
Then again, indenting, has no meaning. I know people who indent all their text just because they like to have larger left margin. It will also produce improper markup for lists -- when people make a "multi-paragraph" list items intead of using headings, like this:
# First paragraph of item one : Second paragraph of item one # First paragraph of item twoI see no sane way to handle this correctly and keep the numbering of lists the way it is expected -- we best avoid this.
I fail to see how using ":" instead of ">" makes it better -- it has all the disadvantages of ">", plus makes it more weird and less compatible with e-mails. Isn't it a little short-sighted to advocate certain markup just to make a one-time job for a single person easier?
Then again, I think we don't really want to be compatible with e-mails in this case. I mean, e-mail quoting serves a totally different purpose than normal text quoting -- when you quote an e-mail with some ">" in it, you most likely want the ">" characters preserved!
The exact rendering of the document is left to the engine. You can use the "<q>" tags alone, or with the tricks described in the article I linked to, or just put the HTML entities for the quoting character. You can even do a server-side browser detection if you feel like it.
You still need a formal markup for the quotes -- because even for plain English text the auto-detection of the characters is not possible in every case (consider "'Tis a fools' errand"), and we don;t want to make Creole specific to the English language. Making it a markup for whole quote, rather than for the single characters seems saner and less prone to errors. -- RadomirDopieralski, 2006-01-01
I don't have a strong feeling about ':' vs '>'. My point is that '>' won't be compatible with emails anyway under the above proposal, because email uses '>' at the beginning of every line, while the proposed markup only includes the markup at the beginning of the paragraph.
I still think that inline quote markup is not quite compatible with the goals of Creole. For one, it violates NotNew because there is no existing wiki that uses it. For two, the preferred rendering is dependent on locale, so that's one more thing for people to (mis-)configure. But again, I don't have a strong feeling about this and would find it a useful way to get my beloved curly quotes if consensus developed here that it did belong in core Creole.
-- Raph Levien 2007-01-01