- From: todd fahrner <fahrner@pobox.com>
- Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 13:00:53 -0700
- To: hammond@csc.albany.edu (William F. Hammond)
- Cc: <bookquestions@oreilly.com>, <www-html@w3.org>
On Thursday, April 18, 2002, at 12:16 PM, William F. Hammond wrote:
> "Laurie Brown" <laurieb@tidalwave.net> writes:
>
>> While this looks OK with the current default behavior of
>> browsers--i.e.,
>> skipping a line between before and after elements denoted as
>> paragraphs--it
>> may not in the future depending on rendering styles. In
>> addition, it does
>> not seem to me to be semantically correct.
>
> Yes, it's not semantically correct. HTML does not provide a suitable
> markup vocabulary for literate writing.
On the whole, I agree. In this case, however, the following is
valid and may be semantically appropriate, too:
<p>A few introductory sentences...
<q>The quote...</q>
A few concluding sentences...</p>
This works as long as the quotation is not itself composed of
multiple blocks, as a list or something. As for the rendering,
'the' default is irrelevant as a criterion for the suitability of
the markup per se, but q { display: block } gets you most of the
way there, probably.
Most print style guides call for quotations to be presented as
blocks only if they would exceed a certain number of lines. Getting
that right would require a close binding - two-way - between
formatting and rendering components, and I'm not aware of any
standards-track technology that attempts this.
--
Todd "don't diss html because your favorite implementation fails to
support suitable renderings" Fahrner
Received on Thursday, 18 April 2002 16:01:04 UTC