RE: The HTML q element can sometimes be useful. Discuss.

Interesting point about ASCII quotes Asmus. Thanks.

Also your point about nesting parentheticals is true. However some parentheticals use square brackets. [sic] - or dashes - just to complicate things.

The interaction of bidi with lang and quotes and nesting would probably make most heads explode.

tex


-----Original Message-----
From: Asmus Freytag (c) [mailto:asmusf@ix.netcom.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2016 1:24 PM
To: Tex Texin; 'John Cowan'; 'Florian Rivoal'; ishida@w3.org; 'W3C Digital Publishing IG'; 'www International'
Subject: Re: The HTML q element can sometimes be useful. Discuss.

On 4/27/2016 12:17 PM, Tex Texin wrote:
> Regarding usefulness, the q element is helpful to screen readers.
>
> Florian commented on the lack of a sentence element. Since paragraphs are a series of sentences, and are generally clearly separated by periods, perhaps there is less of a need.
> However, we might contend that if there is a need to semantically earmark quotes, there is also a justification for doing so to questions and exclamations.
> (I am not asking for this, I am just noting the analogy.)

I suspect that getting "nice" quotation marks from ASCII-only input was a big driver. That added a convenience not needed for other punctuation.

I also wonder whether their use is (or can be made to be) beneficial for bidi layout.
>
> Certainly, they would help screen readers. And to the extent that question marks and exclamation marks change with language, the alleged benefits of the q element providing quote marks would also apply to these statements. Has there been any demand for this?
>
> (I don't think <em> or <strong> are equivalents for exclamations, 
> although they might be used along with them.)
>
> Parenthetical remarks would also benefit from having their own 
> elements

These are interesting because they use paired punctuation in a similar way (although there can be multiple types that are not necessarily "nested" the same way quotations are. (The scope ordinarily nests, but while more than one set of marks can be used, they are not alternating by nesting level).

A./
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 27 April 2016 20:45:20 UTC