- From: Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd) <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:40:11 +0000
- To: Sam Kuper <sam.kuper@uclmail.net>
- CC: Jim Jewett <jimjjewett@gmail.com>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
Sam Kuper wrote: > The suggestion that a UA (I think this is what you meant by "a parser") > should not add or remove vowels and, therefore, should not add or remove > quotation marks, is a non sequitur. As such, I don't think it has any > weight against the proposals I've outlined elsewhere about <q>. Are we not, once again, beating ourselves over the head with a problem that would not even exist if HTML 5 were not required to be backwards-compatible ? If browsers (user agents, if you prefer) were to have an HTML 5 mode of operation and a legacy mode of operation, this and many many analogous problems would immediately disappear. HTML 5 could, for example, mandate that <q> ... </q> will insert "appropriate" quotation marks, thereby making both "<q> ... </q>" and <q>" ... "</q> deprecated, or equally it could mandate that <q> ... <q> will do no such thing, thereby freeing authors to punctuate their quotations as they wish. One could even add a <quote> element which provided the opposite behaviour, and authors could then elect which to use based in their own peronal preferences regarding explicit v. implicit quotation marks. The situation with legacy documents would then become a very simple one : a statistical analysis would indicate whether there is already a marked bias in such documents towards explicit or implicit punctuation, and the legacy mode of operation then defined to produce optimal results for whichever group predominates. Philip TAYLOR
Received on Friday, 31 October 2008 13:40:52 UTC