Quick question about grave accents

Quick question about grave accents

Hi,

I didn’t get a reply on Thread:Translating talk:Phabricator/`$1` and it seems to affect other projects like Toolhub so I try my luck here.

Should we leave the grave accents `$1` as is or is it okay to replace them with quotes? Like here for example? Or here? It seems to me that grave accents mean that the text will be displayed in a monospace font and should be left as is but I might be wrong.

Pinging Verdy p and Urhixidur.

Thanks.

Thibaut (talk)17:08, 23 December 2020

I have serious doubts of te arguments made by Urhicidor that these backquotes are "executable". For me they are just markup (even if it's not the Mediawiki syntax) only for a presentation purpose (intended to render a monospace font, as if it was distinctive enough, whiole in fact such consideration should be in adequation for normal typography (here for a foreign word). I'm not even conveinced the monospace is good here, even if it is syntaxic: monospaced fonts do not line up correctly within sentences and here it is only a basic citation embedded in the rest of the code, and not a program or programming interface at all (monospaced fonts tend to create height line-heights, or would be decorated, making the paragraph conteining much more unpleasant to read, as it would be obscured by unnecessary decorations and extra padding and uneven font heights/line-heights. For me, it's jsut sufficiant to place quotation marks (if we don't want italics). But using quotation marks + monospace font with decaration and change of font-height is even worse: this is just abusing of emphasis.

We don't need it (note that in Mediawiki syntax using the "code" tag is also problematic with its decorations. The alternative was to use the "tt" tag, which undfortunately was deprecated without any good reason in Mediawiki (it was deprecated in HTML becauyse it was supposed to be equivalent to "code", but this is not true with Meiawiki renderers, so now we have to use "kbd" tags instead, which are LESS supported in browsers than "tt" which remains compatible with all of them, including HTML5: the "deprecation" meant only for its insufficient semantic purpose does not mean it is removed, just that "tt" has been *subclassed* by a few more precise element types: "kbd", "smp", however "kbd" iomplies user input and this is not true, while "tt" implied output with optional input on any terminal) HTML5 should have not deprecated "tt" at all (and in fact NO known browser have removed it, so HTML5 was wrong, and other other elements kept or added are not even really better for semantics.

Whinse use othe ways to represent verbatim text to type as is, with its own speciafic quotation marks (Chinese uses various quotation styles, whilst English is extremely poor at handling them correctly and consistantly; so inttead it uses stylistic conventions with uneven changes of font styles, which are not really easier to read and complicate to compose).

Verdy p (talk)02:45, 24 December 2020

Backticks (a.k.a. grave accents) are executable in most shells. There is no good reason to use them in English prose instead of straight or curly quotes, which is why the context of the messages in question leads me to believe they are meant to be executable. The qqq should clarify whether this is the case or not.

Urhixidur (talk)14:20, 2 January 2021

No. The most probabable reason is that it initially was using Markdown instead of the Mediawiki syntax for a monospaced font or text input (like in HTML with "code", "kbd", "tt" elements). It is not meant at all to be executable as is. this is just specifying text that can only be used verbatim (and normally not translated... except that we don't know what is in $1: if it was real code, the backticks would be part of the code and escaped inside $1, but here they are left outside of $1, meaing clearly that they are purely presentational and not semantic at all, so they are just used as a form of visual emphasis and backquotes should not be even present (or if they are, they should be correct quotation marks for the target language (and if quotation marks are really shown, there should not evben be any additional emphasing with italics or other font styles or decorations, the quotation marks being enough by themselves (and any other decoration being clearly redundant, according to almsot all typography handbooks for French at least, but even for English as well!).

Verdy p (talk)15:41, 2 January 2021
 

It will be difficult to get the Phab developers to comment on what's the intention with them. Most likely they are for monospace styling (which I don't think is for us to decide).

Nike (talk)13:44, 4 January 2021