RE: <q> vs. <quote>, naming etc. (was Re: [www-html] <none>)

Tantek Çelik wrote:

> This is not just a naming issue.

Thanks for explaining this. 
 
> The <quote> tag is NOT the same as the <q> tag.  Very
> similar, but not the same.  The <q> tag is supposed to cause
> the user agent to actually render quotes around the
> quotation. Experience and research has shown that while this
> could be seen as a nice help for authors to relieve them of
> the burden adding in the proper quote characters for a
> quotation taking into account depth, quoting styles of
> different languages etc., the specific quotation marks to
> use are still more of an art than a science, and are not
> very well determined automatically by a user agent.  Thus
> the transition from the HTML4 <q> tag to the XHTML2 <quote>
> tag.
> 
> The <quote> tag, like the <blockquote> tag, does NOT cause
> the user agent to render quotes.

I see why you did what you did in view of what HTML 4 advocates ...

  http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#h-9.2.2.1

..., but although the behavior is slightly different with XHTML 2, the
*semantics* (i.e., "inline quotation") are the same.  I'm not convinced
it warrants a name change to <quote> instead of just an "errata fix" for
<q>.  

[Aside: Opera and Mozilla do support the HTML 4 way of default styling
of at least single-depth <q>'s quote marks. I don't know about MacIE,
but with WinIE you *cannot* style <q> even yourself, because its
developers apparently don't believe in :before & :after content.  Do you
know if this situation will change?]
 
> The author has to either style the <quote> tag with the
> proper :before, content, quotes constructs for the context
> in one place in a style sheet, 

Which IMO is what one should do even today with <q>.

> OR the author could insert the actual quotation marks 
> in the content around the <quote> element.

Yuck -- if you're going to put "..." (or other language-specific quote
marks) around a quote, shouldn't that be "markup" enough? ...

    <p>You say <quote>"Goodbye"</quote>,  
    and I say <quote>"Hello"</quote>.</p>

... seems a stretch.  

But that's really beside the point, which is that considering the
current [in]frequency of <q> usage, and the fact that we're still
talking about inline quotes, can't we just leave it <q>?  

<quote> sticks out like a sore thumb. :)


/Jelks

Received on Thursday, 26 September 2002 17:22:06 UTC