Re: ISSUE-48 (marks-content-markup-attribute): 'marks' content markup attribute for Q (quotation) and BLOCKQUOTE [HTML 5 spec]

Hi Andrew,

On May 29, 2008, at 3:48 PM, Andrew Sidwell wrote:

>
> HTML Issue Tracking Issue Tracker wrote:
>> For Q (quotation) and BLOCKQUOTE a 'marks' content markup attribute.
>> Permits authors greater control over the separation of concerns of
>> styling quotations and specifying the semantics of quotations  
>> within a
>> document. Also allows authors to work around the current state of
>> interoperability across popular UAs.
>> for more detailed discussion, please consult the wiki page at: http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/AddedAttributeQuotationMarks
>
> The use-case here is authors wanting to mark up quotes.  There are  
> two plausible ways of implementing it: just choose one and be done  
> with it.  Sure, <q> has interoperability issues, so pressure IE to  
> fix it or the other browsers to stop using quotes; don't invent a  
> new attribute to permanently embed this weird situation in the  
> specification.  (Just because other weird things are in now mandated  
> by the spec doesn't mean that we should keep on adding weird things  
> to that list.)
>
> Whilst I appreciate that hypothetically it would be nice for some  
> people to specify which way they want things, in practice it won't  
> be a) useful or b) even make a difference to the vast majority of  
> authors, so increasing implementation complexity for such a tiny  
> gain seems, well, silly.  (See "Solve Real Problems".)

I get the feeling you're not taking the time to understand these  
issues before responding to them. You should understand that this  
proposal requires zero implementation whatsoever, let alone leading to  
too much implementation complexity. For those UAs already supporting  
CSS :before and :after and attribute selectors and content generation,  
the only thing required is a change to the UAs default stylesheet. How  
can a minor change to an implementation stylesheet like that possibly  
trump the needs of authors and users.

As for telling authors to make up their mind, that's just silly. There  
are clearly reasonable arguments for both quotations as punctuation  
and quotations as a matter of style. This simple proposal meets the  
needs of both authors while requiring authors happy with the current  
situation of quotations as matter of style to do nothing with their  
content. I am quite astonished that this proposal could face any  
controversy whatsoever.

Take care,
Rob

Received on Thursday, 29 May 2008 16:28:27 UTC