Re: Wiki summary of q element default styling issues

On 21/04/2016 17:29, John Cowan wrote:
> ishida@w3.org scripsit:
>
>> i changed the text to:
>>
>> "Opinions from people on the public-digipub and www-international
>> mailing lists point to a desire for quotation marks to remain in the
>> format appropriate to the language of the text which lies outside
>> the principal quotation, rather than to change according to the
>> language of the text inside the quotation. This also means that
>> there is no linguistically-sensitive change to quotation marks used
>> for quotations within quotations."
>
> As long as you are adding minority opinions, why not add mine, which has
> seen some support on this list?
>
> "Others believe that even if the behavior of the q element were to be
> fully standardized,

what do you mean by 'fully standardized'?  What's currently lacking in 
terms of standardisation?  Or do you mean, always used in a standard 
way?  Or do you mean, if all the browsers implemented the default 
display of q in the same way?

> no single set of conventions can meet all needs,
> and that therefore the q element should be avoided in favor of explicit
> quotation marks, unless semantic analysis needs to determine which
> parts of the text are quotations.

People who don't want to use the q markup, but would prefer to hardcode 
quote marks are perfectly free to do that.

That said, i'm not sure that authors can always determine or even think 
about in advance whether semantic analysis will be applied. But for me, 
that isn't necessary anyway - HTML is about semantically identifying 
stuff by default. For example, thinking about blockquotes or figures, I 
don't choose to use blockquote or figure elements only when i think 
there's a chance that someone will try to harvest blockquotes or 
figures, i use the elements because they describe the content, and also 
because they typically come with some minimally useful default 
rendering. If someone wants to parse the semantics then they can. If i 
want to later restyle all items of a given semantic, i can also do that.

> In this case, each q element should
> be associated with a class which bears an explicit CSS quote property."

I don't understand this.  Why would i need to add a class to every q 
element?  Surely you'd only need to introduce a class for quotations 
when you don't want to follow the default - and if you're using CSS 
properly, often you don't even need class names then either, since the 
selectors can be written to understand the context in which a q element 
sits. (Bear in mind that the default can easily be redefined by a line 
or so of CSS if you're unhappy with the default that HTML provides.)

This also relates to your concern about 'no single set of conventions 
can meet all needs'.  I don't think there is such an expectation, i'm 
just talking about a fallback that provide some visual assistance where 
people do want to use the q markup. The content author is always able to 
use CSS to define specifically how they want the q element to look.  The 
HTML default styling of any element usually fails to meet all needs, but 
it's often useful to have such fallback styling anyway.

The specific issue that concerns me in this thread is how to ensure that 
any fallback default styling best represents what the majority of people 
would expect to see.




ri

Received on Monday, 25 April 2016 11:14:40 UTC