Final thoughts on <q>

At this point, reading through all of the various comments on <q>, it has
become clear that we are all talking about similar but not identical
proposals around <q>. At this stage, I think that most of us are mostly in
agreement on <q>, but there are some points of difference. Frankly, since
<q> is so rarely used, and since no matter what happens (even the behavior
which I personally think would be a bad idea) is easily avoided via CSS, I
don't think it is worth discussing. If various UA implementers don't mind
adding in a bunch of code to try to handle <q>, internationalization, etc.,
that's up to them. As someone who has written parsers for HTML at a
non-presentational level to extract information for HTML documents, I am not
thrilled about the idea of people using the <q> tag and expecting certain
behaviors from the UAs. But, as it has been made clear in the past, HTML 5
is primarily driven by the needs and implemented realities of Web browsers.

As such, I don't see any value that I can deliver on this topic. I (and a
few other people) have stated our objections to <q> creating quotes
automatically, expressed concern about how it would handle various edge
cases and error conditions, and so on. My #1 concern is really of the
"slippery slope" type. If it looks like we're sliding down that slope on
other tags, I'll gladly pick up where I left off, but until then... :)

J.Ja

Received on Thursday, 30 October 2008 03:12:25 UTC