Re: Expected behaviour of quotation marks

On 04/07/2016 10:39 AM, ishida@w3.org wrote:
>
> To bring this in line with what most people are suggesting so far, it seems to me that the styling for q needs to be based on
> the language identified as that of the reader, only. In many cases, that's the language at the top of the page in the html
> tag.  In a bilingual page in French Canadian, however, the lang attribute you need may be somewhere further down the
> hierarchy, at some rather arbitray point, and may be difficult to identify.

I think that depends a bit on what you're doing with the quotes.
Nested speaker quotations maybe, but quotation marks are also
used for things like titles, "air quotes", and other effects
which imho seem to work better if we don't jump contexts.

I think this is *especially* true if considering a non-CJK
fragment inside a CJK paragraph. Using CJK quotation marks
inside a Latin segment would look very disruptive.

Between this and the fact that it's not that easy to determine
the "context" language (is it lang on <html>? what about <body>?
what about <article> or <section>? what about <blockquote> or
<p>? what about <div>?), I think the rules in the CSS spec (use
the language of the immediately- surrounding text) is the best
default behavior.

Authors can always adjust if they want something more specific.

> Perhaps what we need is a CSS rule that says, 'If you're not
> inside a q element, then set the quotes per the language outside
> the quote; but if you are inside, ignore the language info.'
>
> I'm not quite sure how to say that in selector-speak yet.

   [lang] { quotes: whatever; }
   q, q [lang] { quotes: inherit; }

(You need to make the second rule more specific than the first,
though, by adding some always-matching selectors or somesuch.)

~fantasai

Received on Friday, 8 April 2016 04:17:55 UTC