<q addmarks=true>

I am mostly just reposting Rob's suggestion under a more specific
subject -- I think either of these would solve the problem.

Robert J Burns wrote:

> In addition to the heuristics, it might make sense to add mechanisms
> both to HTML and CSS to control this. For example adding a marks
> attribute accepting the values "needed" (default) or "provided" would
> let authors indicate the authoring convention they were using for
> quotations (as I proposed with issue-48[1]).

So addmarks would effectively turn off the default styling.

Then <q>oops.</q> would be appropriate, and the User Agent would be
expected to render it as "oops", in a typical English environment.

But <q addmarks=false>'oops.'</q> would indicate that any desired
quotation marks (or ellipses, or other formatting) had already been
added by the author.

Given the addmarks attribute, I don't think heuristics would even be
needed.  They would permit better display of legacy content, but even
without them, it would at least be possible to do the "right" thing in
all new cases, and to degrade no worse than today.


> Also, a mechanism could
> be added to CSS to ... (removing any matching quotations from the
> boundary of the element the pseudo elements are attached to).

Yes, but I wonder if the right answer here is just to support generic
selectors that can peek into the text itself.

    q char-equal('"') { display: None; }

But then I wonder if that isn't really just an argument to use XSLT,
and not worry about such minor details if neither the server nor the
browser can process it.

-jJ

Received on Friday, 31 October 2008 19:20:35 UTC