- From: Andrew Stevens <andrew-stevens@sbcglobal.net>
- Date: Sun, 8 Feb 2004 01:35:18 -0800 (PST)
- To: www-html@w3.org
> But if any software ever starts making real use of > such markup, shouldn't it start from recognizing > quotations as quoted text by the use of quotation > marks? It's not 100% sure of course, but quotation > marks are _far_ more common for years to > come, anyway. A couple years back, as an exercise, I made an effort on a couple projects to try and use as many HTML elements as possible. Of course, when it came to <q> I had to cope with the different visual renderings of this element (most notably IE's failure to enclose text with <q> with quotation marks). To get around this I placed the following in my style sheet: q:before { content: no-open-quote; } q:after { content: no-close-quote; } and manually placed quotation marks before and after the quotes. I didn't continue to use this technique, because I found it to be a little too hacky for my tastes. Mark Pilgrim developed another hacky method to deal with <q> elements by making IE italicize them. You can read about his technique at: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/05/04/the_q_tag He also has scrapped his CSS hack in favor of a server-side solution when he learned that JAWS didn't recognize the <q> element. Reflecting on this issue now, I'd actually prefer it if all browsers didn't put quotation marks around <q> for a couple reasons. First, as Jukka points out, the use of quotation marks around quoted text isn't wanted 100% of the time. Also, I can see uninformed authors using the <q> element to attain the visual effect of quotation marks for text that truly ins't a quotation. Thus, I'd prefer browsers to leave the <q> element unstyled by default and leave it to a style sheet to determine how the element will be presented visually. -- Andrew Stevens http://www.4serendipity.com
Received on Sunday, 8 February 2004 04:47:28 UTC