- From: Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>
- Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2008 14:47:24 +0200
- To: "Lachlan Hunt" <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>, "Ben Boyle" <benjamins.boyle@gmail.com>
- Cc: "HTML WG" <public-html@w3.org>
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