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Re: [Gen-art] Genart last call review of draft-ietf-core-senml-versions-02

Elwyn Davies <elwynd@folly.org.uk> Mon, 03 May 2021 23:18 UTC

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From: Elwyn Davies <elwynd@folly.org.uk>
To: Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org>
Cc: Elwyn Davies <elwynd@dial.pipex.com>, draft-ietf-core-senml-versions.all@ietf.org, gen-art@ietf.org
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Subject: Re: [Gen-art] Genart last call review of draft-ietf-core-senml-versions-02
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Apologies...  Somewhere my memory has become garbled. You are quite right RFC Editor is relentlessly focused on double quotes.  I  obviously getting too old for this job.

Cheers,
Elwyn

On 3 May 2021 21:25, Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org> wrote:

On 2021-05-03, at 22:10, Elwyn Davies <elwynd@folly.org.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi, Carsten.
>
> My understanding is....
>
> RFC editor position: use single quotes for everything. 

Wasn’t that way for my first 42 RFCs :-)

> Standard US view apparently.

US view is actually rather unanimously double quotes (outside any outer double quotes, see below).  You can find various inflections points in 1812 and 1908, where people have briefly suggested other ways, but only the British have largely (but not universally) stuck with single quotes.

> British position (my version): long passages, especially direct speech quotes to be enclosed in double quotes.  Odd words and short phrases within sentences use single quotes. 

“Kids today” (says https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/10/single-quotes-or-double-quotes-its-really-quite-simple.html :-).  That seems to be a recent invention (maybe Fowler mentions something similar in 1908 (*)).

> Quotes within quotes alternate between double and single quotes. 

That is pretty much universal.

> Generally ending punctuation goes inside the quote marks in literary works. 

That is very much US only.

> Technical authoring tends to be rather freer!

Or more correct, actually…
https://www.dailywritingtips.com/punctuation-errors-american-and-british-quotation-marks/

Of course, the best quote marks are the German ones: »Mehr Licht!«
I tend to use them in technical writing when the subject of the writing assigns specific meanings to single and double quote marks (as in the C language, for instance).
For the historical accident that ASCII is, I can’t do that in RFCs yet...

Grüße, Carsten

(*) https://www.bartleby.com/116/406.html
Scroll down to "There are single and double quotation marks”.
The text is funny as it recommends double quotes in some places and then uses single quotes in the examples for that…


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