HTML5's Q element

Having quotation punctuation generated by the user agent is utterly wrong. This discussion has been going from a long time ago in the mailing lists. Quotation marks for the /q/ element should be provided in the source so that 1) non-graphical user agents can represent them, otherwise the content would be flawed, and 2) to avoid issues that arise when writing content in different languages: in French for example, the reference of the quote is written inside the quote inside quotation marks (..., he whispered, ...) while in English that's put outside the quotation marks; there's also problems with punctuation in/outside quotation marks that's different in languages.
After all these arguments, the best is to prevent automatic generation of quotation marks and notify web authors to add them outside the /q/ element itself, since if quotes generation is preserved, then why not auto generate periods for end of /p/ elements too?
-- 
Yahia Chlyeh

Received on Wednesday, 26 August 2009 19:38:33 UTC