[html] Issue: Default styling for q element marked as i18n

r12a has just labeled an issue for https://github.com/w3c/html as 
"i18n":

== Default styling for q element ==
**[This issue is carefully focused on language choices made by the 
styling shown in 10.3.6 Quotes in the spec. Please do not widen it to 
discuss the appropriateness of specific quotation marks proposed in 
that section for a given language, and please do not widen it to a 
more general discussion about the value or not of the q element. There
 are likely to be other issues raised for those points.]**

Users expect default quotation marks around quotes to conform to the 
conventions of a particular language. For example, en-US typically 
uses “ ...”, whereas in Greek text a user may expect to see «...».

A recent discussion on the Digital Publications IG list and the I18n 
IG list produced a groundswell of opinion that the styling indicating 
the selection of localised quotation marks in the HTML spec is 
incorrect. The choice of quotation marks should not be based on the 
language of the quote itself. Instead, the styling should look at the 
language outside the quote and use that to determine the quotation 
marks used.  Furthermore, quotes embedded inside other quotes should 
by default still be surrounded by the quotation marks of the language 
outside the outermost level quote. 

The discussion lead to suggestions for two alternative ways to style 
default quotation marks.

This is summarised in more detail at 
http://w3c.github.io/i18n-discuss/default-quote-styling. Please read.

The i18n WG would like the folks working on HTML to consider these 
findings and propose a way forward.

(fwiw, this also harks back to a bugzilla issue that was closed 
without complete resolution, and which can be found at 
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13398)


See https://github.com/w3c/html/issues/314

Received on Tuesday, 3 May 2016 12:04:21 UTC