RE: HTML5's Q element

<q>Just a quick question, hopefully clearing up my understanding of the
issue...

Is UA insertion of quotes essentially the same idea as inserting bullets for
list items? 
We have all kinds of different bullets but they're handled by the UA and CSS
not within 
the content.

Cheers,
Ryan</q>

 

Ian is probably the better one to answer this, but I would say that the
dynamic is the same in both the li and q contexts. In both cases you are
identifying a section of text as being part of a structure and using styles
to identify how to handle rendering of that structural element.  

 

The rationale as I think is implied by Ian's reaction to this thread is that
the ability to have the quote chars settable by styles (like bullets) allows
for greater flexibility for re-presentation. The reason for using the q tag
is to identify something as an inline-quote; doing so could be for any
number of reasons including but not limited to styling. As Chris mentioned,
if there are q tags in an rss feed the quotes for an article may easily be
pulled out. So the question is .  if you are bothering to distinguish quotes
in this manner, should the UA inject the quotation-MARKS for something
marked as quoted content? The utility of being able to specify bullets for
list items I think is an excellent example of the advantages gained for the
current q-tag implementation and why it is not wrong at all. The only real
difference is that there aren't bullet characters on a keyboard and so the
bullet styles/options for li make life a lot easier than helping with quote
chars.

 

I would also point out that content-editors should honor whatever quote
characters are used by the person inputting the text and provide the option
to generate a q tag and appropriate css-class when quotes are used.  It was
never my intent to say that an author should not control the quote
characters. The author shouldn't have to think much about it; the technology
between the content author and the various outputs for the content is what
needs to be concerned with the html formatting and what to do with it.

 

Art C

Arthur Clifford