Hi allHaving consulted the Lady of the House over a cocktail or two, I think we understand the problem and have a solution (given a decision what an apostrophe should look like on paper.)
We have (at least) three logical symbols: 1. a singular possessive - this is Ron' book 2. a plral posessive - these the are mens' books 3. a missing word ain't (or old English an't)In principle we need three different symbols, **BUT** these different symbols are only needed for computerized searches, not for visual scanning by humans, of text. The principle is already implemented in XML: different U-codes can point to the same symbol.
So we want four different Ucode points, possibly !amiss;, !asing;, and !aplur: and !apos;, the first three of which point to the symbol currently ’ and the fourth which points to ' (I use ! instead of & to avoid any mis-interpretation of symbols by my email software (Thunderbird)).
Given these pointers in Ucode any software can unambiguously parse any XML code. Any human will (or should be intelligent enough to) read the visual display and interpret correctly the meaning of the symbol correctly.
But what should the (single) symbol look like on paper? The Lady of the House is quite clear on this - "at school I was taught my Mr. Webster that an apostrophe was a 'small filled in 9' raised above the line", rather 'like a comma, which is a small filled in 9 on the line and projecting below'".
I defer totally to Mr. Webster (whoever he was) and to the Lady of the House - Jacqui Holland-Bradley, as she was then known, and the lady who introduced IP-networking to the British and European community when the Telcos of the UK and Europe were all saying "we will never do this Internet thing over here - OSI is the way to go". Anybody remember OSI?
As a matter of total irrelevance to the apostrophe question, Jacqui hosted and organized the first occasion at her IPNetworking conference in 1991 when the USSR (as it was then) connected to the Internet. As such she speaks with the authority of, 'she who must be obeyed' (and if you haven't met Rumpole of the Bailey, your education is sadly incomplete - Jacqui worked out of Gray's Inn)!
Ron Christopher R. Maden wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Mathieu Malaterre wrote:Hi there, I would like to know what are people using for there apostrophe in there docbook document ? There are 4 contestants: 1 ’ (curly on UTF-8 system) 2 ’ 3 ' 4 ’ #3 is the fastest to type. #2 and #4 are ugly to read when editing the .xml file using text file. How about solution #1 ?№s 1, 2, and 4 are exactly the same. The XML parser will treat them identically (assuming the rsquo entity is defined correctly). While №s 2 and 4 are ugly to read, they are easy to type; further, № 2 is much easier to remember than № 4. № 1 is very hard to type for most people; I have the kind of brain that remembers character codes, and I don’t mind typing Ctrl-Shift-U 2 0 1 9 SPACE in order to enter it (in a GNOME system), or & ' 9 (in an RFC 1345 environment like Emacs), or Alt-0146 in Windows, but I really don’t expect anyone else to do that. Someday, someone will create an affordable, usable keyboard with proper punctuation on it... Until then, I recommend № 2. ~Chris - -- Chris Maden, text nerd <URL: http://crism.maden.org/ > “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” — H.P. Lovecraft GnuPG Fingerprint: C6E4 E2A9 C9F8 71AC 9724 CAA3 19F8 6677 0077 C319 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAktdyuYACgkQGfhmdwB3wxmhtACeJ9hZ6uROPNMndSz012DAY1KP 5zEAoNtrg+jBN2STezZiILwyqkAt7blx =VrdC -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: docbook-apps-unsubscr...@lists.oasis-open.org For additional commands, e-mail: docbook-apps-h...@lists.oasis-open.org
-- Ron Catterall Ph.D. D.Sc. r...@catterall.net http://catterall.net
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