Ian Hickson wrote:
On Wed, 2 Sep 2009, Seth Call wrote:
For IE8, FF 3.5, and Opera 10 (although not Safari 4), this behavior of
adding quotes is done with the default CSS style sheet of the browser;
not in the HTML rendering itself.
If you style q like so:
q:before {
content: no-open-quote;
}
q:after {
content: no-close-quote;
}
Then the quotes go away in those 3 browsers.
On Wed, 2 Sep 2009, T.J. Crowder wrote:
Having the UA add the quotes is not a good idea, and will almost
certainly lead to hacks like UAs looking to see if the quotes are
already there and only adding them if they're not.
Even if IE8, FF3.5, et. al. and such are already doing this, they're
implementing the bleeding edge of this spec and should be agile enough
to cope with changes to it as it is finalised.
On Wed, 2 Sep 2009, Ryan Roberts wrote:
Whether it's no common or not it's a bad idea that needs changing sooner
rather than later.
On Thu, 3 Sep 2009, Henri Sivonen wrote:
It's a bad idea, sure. But it doesn't follow that<q> in itself is a
good idea and needs changing.
My conclusion is that adding quotes is a bad idea *and*<q> in itself
isn't particularly useful. Thus, the solution is not to use<q> in
newly-authored documents.
Hixie, maybe<q> should be obsolete but conforming...
On Thu, 3 Sep 2009, Arthur Clifford wrote:
I think this comes down to how HTML/HTML5 is going to be utilized, is it
describing a document object model; in which case a quote (or quoted
text) is an object and proper display of a quote object should be up to
the user agent, as informed by style sheets, thus keeping content and
its face separate. Or is HTML merely a markup language, in which case
what is the philosophical reason for having a q-tag? When is it used and
why?
Back when there were proof-readers they would mark-up something that
should be a quote; isn't that what you're doing in html too? Quoted
content needs to be distinguishable from the content around it, which is
done with quotation-marks. Shouldn't the marks used in a document for
quoted content be identifiable through styles and/or along with a
section of quoted text? If so, isn't the quote tag the logical place to
define those styles, either in a global style or as a style attribute on
the quote tag?
The localization argument I thought was a compelling argument for the
user agent to handle putting in quotes. It is an example of what is
possible when you treat a document as a DOM versus just marking up text.
If quoted content is treated like an object then things like
localization are easier to facilitate.
I would hope that content-editors such as DreamWeaver would help out by
indicating usage of " and q together and would somehow notify the user
if that is what they want to do. The specification should recommend
against an html renderer doing such checks though. I think people would
figure out quickly that things are double-quoted and fixing that
shouldn't be hard.
If you want quote marks in the source, use quote marks in the source, and
don't use<q>.
If you want quote marks added automatically, use<q>.
This makes little sense. What you're saying is <q> has no semantic
purpose anymore, it's there for presentation (see your further down).
What is the point in moving things forward if we can't correct past
mistakes?
It would be stupid of us to try to change this now given that all four
major browsers ship with a<q> that inserts quote marks. This was
discussed in depth last year, and the spec was changed (from not inserting
quotes to inserting quotes) after it was concluded that swimming against
the browser vendors here was futile.
Then hand the spec over to them.
At this point, the<q> element's purpose is to enable CSS-based quotation
mark injection. If you don't want that, then don't use<q>.
So at this point how do you mark up an inline quote?
Ryan
--
Web Designer
Web: http://ryanroberts.co.uk
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 07759 917 964
