191910 - Add munger rules for `` and ''

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Other Applications :: ChatZilla, defect)

Description

[Jo Hermans]

Build 2003020403 on Mac OS X 10.2.3

I noticed some strange quotes in Chatzilla. Look around the word 'moznet' : you
see 2 backquotes before, and 2 normal quotes after.

[INFO]	Network view for ``moznet'' opened.
[INFO]	Attempting to connect to ``moznet''. Use /cancel to abort.
[INFO]	Connecting to moznet via irc.mozilla.org:6667, attempt 1 of 5...

I've seen these artifacts before on the web, and they must come from some kind
of charset-conversion problem. On my website, they're normally generated by
Internet Exploder on Windooze. I guess it's a double-quote (or that fancy
Unicode-version of it), that gets converted to 2 back or normal quotes.

You can see those quotes in the source-code :
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/extensions/irc/xul/locale/en-US/chatzilla.properties
Look around line 221 for instance.

I looked in Bugzilla, but didn't found a duplicate yet.

Comment 1

[Samuel Sieb]

This is not a bug.  You'll have to ask rginda why he did it that way.  :-)

Comment 2

[Robert Ginda]

I dunno, I'd seen it done in other apps, and over irc, and I kind of like it.

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

Must be some alien kind of typographical rule. I took typography classes a
(very) long time ago, and this was one of things that you were not supposed to do.

Anyway, since you're not using regular quotes, you don't you use ‘ or
’ (left and right single quotes) or “ and ” (left and right
double quotes ? Just a suggestion to make Mozilla a bit more polished.

Comment 4

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

``foo'' is the unix poor-man's alternative to nice curly quotes. “ and
” would be the best thing to use here.

Comment 5

[Robert Ginda]

This text comes from a .properties file, and is displayed in chatzilla via DOM
manipulation (ie. document.createTextNode), which does not grok HTML entities,
afaik.

Comment 6

[Jo Hermans]

Well, why don't use regular double quotes then ? Or single ?

Comment 7

[Robert Ginda]

Because I prefer ``foo'' over "foo" and 'foo' in this case.

Comment 8

[Robert Ginda]

It occurs to me that we could add a munger rule to turn "``" and "''" into the
numeric equiviliant of the &[lr]dquo; entities, whatever they happen to be. 
This would have the advantage (?) of performing the replacement on normal IRC
messages, too.

Comment 9

[Robert Ginda]

Attachment: patch

With this patch, all "poor man" double quotes will turn into unicode double
quote characters, regardless of whether message is generated by chatzilla
itself, or by an irc user.

I'll push a new xpi with this onto http://www.hacksrus.com/~ginda/chatzilla/

Comment 10

[James Ross]

I'm not sure I like the idea of messing with the quotes being sent over IRC
itself... though anything to get rid of ``text'' would be good (personally I
think it looks really stupid).

Comment 11

[Benoit]

In the french translation, we use another kind of quotes marks (« and
» respectively). We escape them in the .properties file using
\u[something] like we have to do with accentuated characters (in our case \u00ab
and \u00bb).

I think you should consider modifying the .properties file like we do instead of
post-processing it.

Comment 12

[Robert Ginda]

Nothing about this patch prevents the french translation from using their own
double quotes in the .properties file.  In the default case, I'd prefer to leave
the translation up to the munger.  This lets a user disable the option if
they're using a font that doesn't have the double-quote characters, and makes
the .properties files easier to read.

Comment 13

[Robert Ginda]

checked in

Comment 14

[Jo Hermans]

Seems fixed in build 2003022603, except in the title-bar : User jhermans on 
``moznet'' ..."