Re: <q>

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 8:22 PM, Justin James <j_james@mindspring.com>wrote:
[snip]

> I repeat:
>
> Automatically generation punctuation is fraught with danger.
>
> J.Ja
>

I agree.

This pretty much exactly matches my initial impression when first reading
the description of <q> in the HTML 4.01 specification. One of those notions
that sounds like it might be a good idea - at first - but fails badly in the
edge cases. (To be honest "insanely bad idea" was more like the words that
came to mind.)

To be fair, I thought it *possible* (if unlikely) that the edge cases might
somehow be covered. From the discussion prior, this just cannot be right in
all cases. Using <q> to add a bit of machine-recognizable semantics is
reasonable. Using <q> as an initially neutral container to which style and
behavior rules can be applied, is also reasonable. Inserting printable
characters into the viewed HTML document is dubious for any case where the
browser's default is different from the author's intent, and the mix of
languages (and associated lexigraphic conventions) in use.