Using quotes

[sachaburnett]

Hi all,

Is it 100% necessary to use the XHTML special characters for the double
quotes (ie., ” and &ldquo? Or is it OK to simple type in the
quote character?

I know that they won't appear as "real" quotes (ie., left quotes won't
appear as a "66" and the right quote won't appear as a "99") but this
doesn't really bother me.

TIA!

SB

 

[David Dorward]

Is it 100% necessary to use the XHTML

Argh. Search the archives of this group for reasons why XHTML is probably a
bad idea for you.

special characters for the double quotes (ie., ” and &ldquo? Or is
it OK to simple type in the quote character?

Regular quotes (&quot can be used to delimit attribute values, you need to
can't use the raw character in those circumstances. Otherwise its fine.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Is it 100% necessary to use the XHTML special characters for the double
quotes (ie., ” and &ldquo?

It is by no means necessary. In XHTML, it is even questionable practice,
since a user agent is not required to process the external entity
declarations. (You probably have no idea of what this means, and this is one
reason why you should stick to HTML and stay away from XHTML.)

Or is it OK to simple type in the quote character?

By "the quote character", you apparently mean the Ascii quotation mark,
which is not a correct punctuation mark in any human language, formal
languages excluded. Does this give you a hint?

I know that they won't appear as "real" quotes (ie., left quotes won't
appear as a "66" and the right quote won't appear as a "99") but this
doesn't really bother me.

It's up to you. Most authors still use the Ascii quotation mark, and it's a
catastrophe in a typographical sense only. You don't need to escape the "
character in any way.

If you wish to use correct punctuation marks, you need to learn how to enter
them in your authoring software in a manner that makes them represented
properly, with the character encoding (typically UTF-8) declared properly.
It's not rocket science, but it's not quite trivial either. Using ”
and “ might be a reasonable compromise, _if_ you use HTML.