On 5/28/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
What I understand of the usage of the double
apostrophe is, that it is
always used in the middle of a word. This means that this could be
fixed by not interpreting "markup" when it is in the middle of a word.
Do you mean in general, or only for page titles? Changing that rule in
general would surely break heaps of articles across all the
Wikipedias. I imagine various products would have italics for half a
word and so forth. But perhaps it could be enabled on a per-Wiki
basis?
Other possibilities might be inclusion of a nothing-character
(some'<nothing/>'word, or even some'<!---->'word) or a flag
whereby
the page title maps some other character/sequence of characters (such
as the double quote) onto the taboo sequence (two apostrophes). This
latter suggestion would be like what we were discussion a month or two
ago about fixing lower case characters at the start of titles.
In fact it could be generalised:
{{Titlemap|"|''}} (titlemap|double quote|two apostrophes) could, for
example, request that that substitution take place in the title. All
pages linking to this one would still have to use double quotes rather
than two apostrophes, however. It's a kludge though.
Failing that, I can't think of much. I'm actually surprised that there
isn't a way of easily producing the '' sequence other than <nowiki>. I
suppose it's a side-effect of the less-than-optimal choice of '' for
italics and ''' for bold - if two different characters had been chosen
(say __ for bold), then you could produce a '' with '''' and you
could
produce a __ with ____. Then, bold italics would be either
__''bolditalics''__ or ''__italicsbold__'' . But anyway.
Steve