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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 09/26/06 19:41
Andreas Prilop wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Sep 2006, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
>>> Two single quotes equals a double quote?
>>
>> Are you serious?
>
> Nobody thinks that a double quotation mark consists of
> a pair of single quotation marks.
> Why then do many people think that an ellipsis U+2026
> consists of three periods?
You're wonderful, Andreas. I made a probably useless comment to a troll's
message, and now you're turning this into an interesting discussion. You're
wonderful even when you are wrong...
The ellipsis U+2026 is a compatibility character, which is equivalent to a
sequence of three full stop (period) characters. Compatibility equivalence
does not mean identity, of course, but it means close resemblance and
potential replaceability. The double quotation marks have no compatibility
(or other) decompositions.
> Why should double quotation marks and ellipsis be treated
> differently?
Because the ellipsis is a character that _may_ be used instead of "..."
(three full stop characters) _if_ you regard it as suitable to express the
idea of spaced dots at the character level and not as a stylistic issue. You
could use <span class="ell">...</span> instead, with some CSS code that
reduces character specing (say, .ell { letter-spacing: 0.1em}). Some people
might even say that this is consistent with the idea of separating content
from presentation.
On the practical side, the ellipsis - whether written as character data as
such, using a suitable encoding, or as character reference … or as
entity reference … - works rather widely on the www, because it
belongs to the Windows Latin 1 character repertoire. So far so good.
But the glyph for the ellipsis is unsuitable in several fonts. It often has
the dots as close to each other as in "..." - or even closer! Even if you
check that the font you suggest in your CSS code has a good-looking
ellipsis, the user might view the page using some other font.
I think I also need to remark that at least according to the Chicago Manual
of Style, only some languages (such as English) use "spaced periods" whereas
e.g. French, Italian, and Spanish use "suspension points", which are three
normal full stop characters, with no special spacing. Thus, by using the
ellipsis character (even when the font implements it properly) you might end
up with using the typographic principles of a language other than the one
you use in your document.
P.S. You forgot to mention about setting followups in the message body, so
I've temporarily added alt.html and now again set f'ups to c.i.w.a.misc.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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