Re: Correct usage of the q element

*Jewett, Jim J*:

I hope you don't mind I add www-html back in.

>> I wish [entities] could be defined language dependent,

That was just a wish, not a proposal (I have no time machine at hand).

> Realistically, very few people will type "&sq".
> They will either type the quote mark that they want

That's not possible for many languages on most keyboards and neither in
popular ISO-8859-1, which only has ", ', » and «. Most people would probably
continue to use ", which would also be the default for &sq; and &eq;.

> or they will leave it blank.

Quotations with neither quotation marks nor mark-up are no quotations.

> If the user agent knows what to do with &sq; for the language,

In my wish that was definable in the DTD and required no further UA knowledge.
In actual HTML one entity means one character, which isn't required by neither
SGML nor XML.

> it will also have a good default for <q lang= >.

In my wish, or call it vision, 'q' didn't add characters into the document,
because I don't think mark-up should do that (list bullets are a different
thing).

> If it doesn't know what to do, then the default <q> styling is
> probably still an improvement over its unrecognized entity handling.

The default styling of HTML4's 'q' in some current browsers is no styling at
all, but unknown entities are indicated somehow.

Received on Friday, 13 February 2004 15:14:54 UTC