Re: <q>

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 12:32 PM, Justin James <j_james@mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Ivan Enderlin [mailto:w3c@hoa-project.net]
>> Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 9:15 AM
>> To: Justin James
>> Cc: 'Olivier GENDRIN'; 'Ben Boyle'; 'Sam Kuper'; 'Chris Wilson'; 'HTML
>> WG'
>> Subject: Re: <q>
>> > The more that questions like this come up, the more that it becomes
>> clear to
>> > me that<q>  is a bad idea. It will never meet the author's needs, or
>> do what
>> > they expect it to do, more than "most of the time", which is always a
>> clear
>> > sign that something is not right.
>> I don't understand your feeling Justin. Oliver got a good argument,
>> i.e.
>> if we specify a lang for a <q> tag, it concerns the <q> content and not
>> the quotation style, which belongs to the typography of the main
>> document language. There is no problem with the @lang attribut I think.
>> Actually, I wonder to understand what is the problem with quotation.
>
> I misspoke... my problem is with the idea of <q> inserting any kind of
> punctuation. Do we ask that <acronym> make its contents capitals and insert
> periods between them? Of course not, even though it may be grammatically
> correct in some cases. I like <q> as a tag to indicate that something is a
> quote, kind of like "blockquote is to div as q is to span". I don't like it
> as trying to plaster on automagical punctuation marks. Does <p> make sure
> that each sentence end with a period, exclamation point or question mark?
>

I guess you have a very strong point there Justin, and I couldn't
agree more with that.
The only remaining issue that concerns me is how is the <q> element
being used today, in the sense of if authors are already using CSS to
remove automatic punctuation to level all browsers (kind of like YUI
reset.css does [1]) or if they are just throwing <q> elements around
assuming the browser will automagically add the quotes.
the sole statement of "blockquote is to div as q is to span" gets
enough strength to make us rethink twice before removing the <q>
element from the spec (or deprecating it).

In fact, while quoting Justin above I got into a (possible) crucial
part of the spec if we decide to default the <q> element to not add
any automatic punctuation at all: do manually added quotes go inside
or outside of the <q> element?
I mean, is it:
- <q>"blockquote is to div as q is to span"</q>
or
- "<q>blockquote is to div as q is to span</q>"
as for what CSS does today the second option would be correct, but
those quotes have no real meaning outside of the semantical element
that gives them a reason to be there. If we are going to change or
specify a way for the <q> element to be used, we need to come to an
agreement on how authors are supposed to use it.


[1] http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/

Received on Tuesday, 28 October 2008 14:39:48 UTC