RE: <q>

From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Sam Kuper
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 11:31 AM
To: Justin James
Cc: Olivier GENDRIN; Ben Boyle; Chris Wilson; HTML WG
Subject: Re: <q>

2008/10/28 Justin James <j_james@mindspring.com>
>> Punctuation is presentation, unless it is content.
>
> I disagree with you. If I'm reading an English novel and I see that the speech in it has
> been typeset using single quotes, this punctuation has both "content" and "presentation" 
> aspects. The "content" aspect is to delineate the text as speech (the single quote marks
> are part of the content of the page). The "presentation" aspect is the use of single
> quotes to do that, given that double quotes would have worked just as well. So your
> assertion is false.

Apples to oranges. Printed content carries zero semantic information outside of what is implied by the intersection of the content and the presentation. HTML has the ability to explicitly provide semantic information using the language itself, completely divorced both from the content and the presentation. My assertion is true with regards to HTML, false with regards to plain text.

>> HTML says it should be content, so defining <q> to do it makes little sense to me.
>
> I must have missed this. Where does HTML say that punctuation is content?

HTML is set up so that anything within an element is content. Punctuation always appears within elements. Therefore, it is content. "&quot;" is an entity, not a tag. Ditto for "&amp;", ".", ",", etc. <p> does not mandate, enforce, or provide punctuation. Etc.

J.Ja

Received on Wednesday, 29 October 2008 03:13:14 UTC