Re: <q>

2008/10/29 Justin James <j_james@mindspring.com>

> So now, you want to tied dozens of other standards to HTML,


There's nothing new (or awful) about having an HTML spec reference other
documents, especially documents produced by other standards institutions.


> just to implement... quotation marks around the <q> tag?


No, not just quotation marks. Appropriate styling, which means, as has
already been established in this thread, something more complex than "just
quotation marks" (but, I am certain, not intractably complex).


> A group of standards so uncommon, that in the case of one of the most
> spoken languages on the planet, the printed version is not available from
> Amazon UK?


It's a *French* standard. It's readily available in France.


> And what happens when the document is written from the perspective of an
>  non-standard dialect? The author loses the ability to safely use <q>?


No, the author would get the default styling for the specified language. If
that wasn't appropriate, then the author could override it, but in such a
case, it's dubious that the language attribute would be correct either.

Regards,

Sam