Re: Wiki summary of q element default styling issues

On 4/25/2016 9:03 AM, ishida@w3.org wrote:
> clearly indicated a preference for quotation marks to follow the 
> language of the text outside the quote. 

The quotation marks should follow the language immediately outside the 
outermost quote. Having nested quotes use some other convention for the 
inner quote, based on the language of the outer quote is a non-starter.


It may be useful for some authors in some specific combination of 
languages, but remember, quotes are so bizarre that some languages use 
what is the "closing" quote for many other languages as their starting 
quote.


You simply can't nest those quotation systems inside each other without 
total confusion.

Same goes for cases where two languages (or regional styles of a 
language) use the same pair of outer / inner marks, but use the opposite 
convention. Again, the only way you can keep that straight is by 
strictly using the language of the surrounding unquoted text.


Ultimately, I think John's suspicion that the punctuation around quotes 
is more like content (more like other punctuation) than style is well 
founded. We don't have semantic objects for things like sentence-ending 
punctuation, even though there are systematic ways their use differs by 
language (e.g. amount of space).


A./