Re: <q> vs <p>

On Oct 31, 2008, at 12:31, Thomas Broyer wrote:

> HTML doesn't mark up "language", it marks up semantics: a <q> denotes
> a quote, so that they can be easily extracted:

If I remember the examples from Goldfarb's Handbook correctly, the  
motivation for <q> in the sample SGML vocabulary (that seems to have  
influenced HTML) was to work around the lack of “ and ” on keyboards  
at the time. I think the semantic origins of <q> have been greatly  
exaggerated.

Aside:
It follows that the problems with en-US and fr-FR can go away in two  
ways:
  1) By using Unicode-level punctuation instead of markup.
  2) By putting <q> exactly where you want the start quotation mark to  
appear and </q> exactly where you want the end quotation mark to  
appear (even if it is semantically wrong in the case of en-US and fr- 
FR).

> http://labs.google.com/inquotes/ (In Quotes uses language analysis,
> but if everyone were using <q> and <cite> the job would much easier);

Why should authors pay the price of making the job of Google's  
competitors easier? Google In Quotes shows that the state of the art  
already works without <q>!

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Friday, 31 October 2008 13:40:52 UTC