- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 11:49:32 +0000 (GMT)
- To: Tantek Çelik <tantek@cs.stanford.edu>
- Cc: Jelks Cabaniss <jelks@jelks.nu>, "www-html@w3.org" <www-html@w3.org>
On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Tantek Çelik wrote: > > On 9/26/02 5:52 PM, "Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch> wrote: > > > It seems to me the most accessible is to have the quotes inserted by CSS > > but have the UA do that by default, just like <strong> is made bold by > > default but can still be styled using CSS. > > > > In other words, exactly what <q> is in HTML4. > > > > Well, that is what I used to think as well, but others with a much > better understanding of quotes and quotations as used across various > languages around the world have demonstrated otherwise. It turns out > UAs (short of some sort of natural language parsing AI) don't have a > chance of properly showing default quote marks that are depth/language > sensitive, despite the fact that a few of us have tried and had some > degree of success in limited contexts. I totally agree -- which is why authors should, IMHO, style the quote marks themselves, using the CSS2 'quotes' property. HTML4 allows for that. (Indeed, Mozilla even suppors that, on <q>, for the non-nested case.) My point is basically that the spec has to be crystal clear on whether the document should include the quote marks or not. If the document should include the quote marks, then they can't be styled by CSS. If the document shouldn't include the quote marks, then it is semantically _identical_ to <q> and therefore only the name has changed. > Hence the change for XHTML2. If you're curious, read the i18n and HTML wg > archives - I won't pretend to understand the i18n reasoning well enough to > reproduce it here. Do you have specific URIs? Those archives are rather large... -- Ian Hickson )\._.,--....,'``. fL "meow" /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. http://index.hixie.ch/ `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Friday, 27 September 2002 07:49:33 UTC