Re: Correct usage of the q element

Le 14 févr. 2004, à 18:30, L. David Baron a écrit :
> Anyway, I think putting the burden of choosing correct quotation marks
> on the user agent is a bad idea.  Different languages have different

:) which hits one of my issue, each time we talk about XHTML/HTML, we 
talk about User agents (browsers) and not Authoring tools.

Usage scenario:

	I'm browsing the Web, read an english Web site with a cool quote. I 
copy it and paste it in my authoring tool.
	1. If the quotes are hard-coded, it means the burden is on the user to 
know how to modify for example from “...” to « ... » in a french 
context.
	2. If the quotes are not hard-coded (use of q), the quotes will 
automatically be adjusted depending on the context.

	Case 1. could be solved if Cut-and-Paste systems from computers were 
having conventions like on a Web page, do you want to copy that as a 
quote. And it will collect the information, the URI (difficult case the 
one of the cite or the one of the Web page you have copied), and it 
will be able to put it back in your authoring tool with the right cite 
and the right quote depending on the context.

	I would love to see that XHTML 2.0 is  addressing the Authoring tools. 
It's not yet done, but I wish it will be.

> what the rules should be [2].  Thus it's hard to get correct most of 
> the
> time even for the most common languages, even with a large amount of
> code that would enlarge and slow down user agents.   Also, those 
> writing
> languages with relatively fewer speakers will be unable to use the
> "correct" markup and have it displayed correctly, since it's even less
> likely that user agents will correctly support their language's
> quotation rules.

I could agree with you, if at least the CSS property was correctly 
supported which is not the case now in most browsers. Too bad, because 
a default CSS could be created or people could defined what they need.

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/generate.html#propdef-quotes

[lang|=fr] > * { quotes: " « " " » " "‹ " " ›"; }
q { font-style: italic; }
q:before { content: open-quote; }
q:after { content: close-quote; }

-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Saturday, 14 February 2004 22:43:50 UTC