Re: smart quotes in docbook - GDP handbook

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sun, 2006-02-05 at 21:28 +0000, Joachim Noreiko wrote:
> I'm looking at the GDP handbook's
> crossreferencing.xml.
> Both the online version and the yelp version show
> smart quotes, making it impossible to copy and paste
> examples of docbook code.
> This is the docbook source:
> 
> <programlisting>
> &lt;ulink type=<quote>help</quote>
> url=<quote>ghelp://user-guide?gosbasic-2</quote>&gt;text&lt;/ulink&gt;
> </programlisting>
> 
> What should be done with it to prevent this problem?
> 
> BTW, I've removed the incorrect slashes from the examples.

Well that's just flat out wrong.  The quote element is for
actual quotations.  It doesn't even guarantee that double
quote marks will be used, let alone the simple straight
quotes.  In French, we use «guillemets» for the quote
element.

When straight quotes (U+0022) are required by some syntax,
the quote element should absolutely, positively not be used.
This should be:

<programlisting>
&lt;ulink type="help"
url="ghelp:user-guide?gosbasic-2"&gt;text&lt;/ulink&gt;
</programlisting>

Joachim, can you go ahead and make this change in CVS?

On a related note, I know there are a few places where
single guillemets were being used for angle brackets
in XML snippets.  So you'd have something like

<programlisting>
‹ulink url="http://www.example.com/"›Example‹/ulink›;
</programlisting>

I think this was a result of somebody's editor trying
to be too smart, and failing miserably.  If anybody
runs across this, please fix it.

--
Shaun