Re: <q> vs <p>

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