[tei-council] Pilcrows, bookmarks, and Links

[Dan O'Donnell]

I've been thinking about the Pilcrow thing. The fact that none of us
seemed to know that that was a bookmark link suggests that no matter how
tastefully it is done, it isn't the right symbol to use. A pilcrow at a
line end says to me "paragraph"--it is the standard symbol for this in
all current wordprocessors when you ask them to show codes.

I took a quick look around yesterday and here are some other suggestions
for an icon (there doesn't seem to be a standard one): some bookmarking
sides seem to use a small colored boxed + (e.g.
http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php). I confess that a small + after the
title was my first guess.

Another option might be a hash #, since what the link does is actually
just produce the URL of the current section and that begins with a hash.
(a hashlike symbol (U2317) also means "Show Data" which is kind of
relevant here).

Or you could just do something weird like a lefthand arrow (←) pointing
at the thing to be bookmarked, or the download arrow, which doesn't seem
to have a unicode number.

Anyway, I'd say the pilcrow is the least best of these options, because
it commonly means something else when it shows up at the end of a line.
The advantage of the others is that they call attention to themselves.
If they had a description on @title in the HTML, I think things would
work fine and be self-explanatory to people.

-dan
-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Chair, Text Encoding Initiative <http://www.tei-c.org/>
Director, Digital Medievalist Project <http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/>
Associate Professor and Chair of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Vox: +1 403 329 2378
Fax: +1 403 382-7191
Homepage: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/