[pmwiki-users] quoted text markup

Peter Bowers pbowers at pobox.com
Sat Sep 24 07:05:00 CDT 2016


On Sat, Sep 24, 2016 at 9:48 AM, Hans <design1 at softflow.uk> wrote:

> 'this is not marked and shows single quotes.'
> "this is not marked and shows double quotes."
> ''this is marked as emphasised with em tags.''
> ""this is marked with (left and right) quotes with q tags""
>

Semantically (talking about it) double-double-quotes is by far the most
intuitive option.

Excellent point that the double-single-quote markup suffers from the same
potential ambiguity as double-double-quotes and your proposed regex indeed
does solve the majority of those case.

Visually I find multiple quotes (single-single, double-single,
single-double, double-double, triple-single, 5-x-single, etc.) to be a
nightmare (!) to read. As I was attempting to analyze your example above I
had to select character-by-character with my mouse to figure out what was
being done.

If it were up for discussion I would vote strongly against the
''emphasized'' and '''bolded''' and '''''emphasized-bolded''''' markups as
well for this reason. The asterisks in markdown and creole are so much more
readable (and at least as intuitive, probably far more so). (Obviously I
can, and do, choose to use more readable alternatives when I am the author.)

The advantage for me in the {"quoted"} or ["cited"] or etc is primarily in
the realm of readability while still maintaining a good approximation of
intuitive markup.  Just glancing at that it is clear to me that this is a
"special" type of character sequence designed to do something special. My
(aging) eyes can easily identify the brackets followed by the quote or
vice-versa. I would happily sacrifice the semantically intuitive nature of
the double-double-quotes for the readablility of the assymetric markup.

-Peter
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