Re: HTML5's Q element

> I'd hope the specification could be amended based on Yahia's excellent points.

+1 to that.  Having the UA add the quotes is not a good idea, and will
almost certainly lead to hacks like UAs looking to see if the quotes
are already there and only adding them if they're not.

Even if IE8, FF3.5, et. al. and such are already doing this, they're
implementing the bleeding edge of this spec and should be agile enough
to cope with changes to it as it is finalised.
--
T.J. Crowder


2009/9/2 Seth Call <sethcall@gmail.com>
>
> For IE8, FF 3.5, and Opera 10 (although not Safari 4), this behavior of adding quotes is done with the default CSS style sheet of the browser; not in the HTML rendering itself.
>
> If you style q like so:
>
>> q:before {
>>   content: no-open-quote;
>> }
>>
>> q:after {
>>   content: no-close-quote;
>> }
>
>
> Then the quotes go away in those 3 browsers.
>
> I'd hope the specification could be amended based on Yahia's excellent points.
>
>
> Seth
>
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 7:23 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 26 Aug 2009, Yahia Chlyeh wrote:
>> >
>> > 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,
>>
>> Why can't non-graphical user agents insert quotes also?
>>
>>
>> > 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;
>>
>> Indeed.
>>
>>
>> > there's also problems with punctuation in/outside quotation marks that's
>> > different in languages.
>>
>> Indeed.
>>
>>
>> > 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?
>>
>> IE8, Firefox, Safari, and Opera all render quotes. We lost this war.
>>
>> You don't have to use <q> though.
>>
>> --
>> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
>> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
>> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>>
>

Received on Wednesday, 2 September 2009 13:44:49 UTC