Re: <q>

On Sun, 26 Oct 2008 02:18:22 +0300, Lachlan Hunt  
<lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au> wrote:

> Ben Boyle wrote:
...
>> A passing suggestion: why not just define some entities... like &oquo;
>> "an opening quote, based on the current language" and &cquo; for
>> closing quotes.
>
> Aside from the technical issues preventing the creation of such magical  
> entity references that behave like that, the real issue is that it's  
> quite difficult to get people to agree on which quotation marks should  
> be used in which circumstances, particularly when considering nested  
> quotes and the wide variaty of quotation marks in different languages.

I think the issue is actually more directly that the creation of entity  
references (or q elements) is not so easy - and without good  
implementation it is hard to see the value.

> Leaving the decision up to the browser will inevitably result in the  
> wrong quotation marks being rendered in a significant portion of cases.

I don't think this is so. (It also needs to be possible to style the  
element).

In principle, the q element can be used for fining quoted material as well  
as presenting it. This is actually important in areas like school and  
university (which globally is a non-trivial use case). Equally, being able  
to have finer grained tracking of sources would be a nice thing forthe  
web. Certainly the q element is not the only way to do this - you could  
allow a cite attribute on anything, for example, or you could just use raw  
RDFa or a µformat or some other solution. If this use case is worth  
supporting, having a standardised element has some value - and since there  
has been one for 10 years, even though it works badly it has made its way  
into all sorts of toolsets, documentation and practices, so removing it is  
more costly than if it had never existed.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Sunday, 26 October 2008 13:48:59 UTC