Re: CSS Generated content selection

~~ I apologize for a late reply. I had some problems sending messages to the list.
~~ I still would like to express my ideas, since the messages are written already.

On Mon, 2007-04-23 at 16:12 +0100, Spartanicus wrote:

> For the current situation where some browsers insert quote marks around
> content marked up with the <q> element (tested with Opera 9.1 & FF2) and
> IE does not (tested with IE6), authors can specify:
> 
> q:before{content:""}
> q:after{content:""}
> 
> which gets rid of the generated quotes in Opera and Mozilla, and then
> maintain the quotes as part of the content proper.
> 
> (regrettably "content:none" isn't supported yet by either of these
> browsers)

I totally disagree with this suggestion.

First of all, the HTML specification clearly states:
	
	"Visual user agents must ensure that the content of the Q element is
rendered with delimiting quotation marks. Authors should not put
quotation marks at the beginning and end of the content of a Q element."

Second of all, sure your way may work _now_ in the few browsers that you
have mentioned. But what if IE will fix the <q> element but still will
not support the :before, :after pseudo-elements. 

Moreover, if the browser does not support CSS ( tested in `lynx` ), or
CSS is disabled the visitor will see double quotation marks which at not
only looks silly but also may be not acceptable of some formal document.
Just to make sure I understood your suggestion correctly, here is the
document that I made my tests on:
http://www.zoffix.com/new/del/quotations.html

Also, I think there well may be cases where the removal of quotation
marks would produce an ambiguous or unclear text.
I am no grammar expert, forgive me if my examples are incorrect, but
consider the following:

	John said, "later".   VS    John said, later.
	Paul said, "What direction?", right? VS	Paul said, What direction?,
right?


I take on the side that the quotation marks generated by <q> element
_should_ be copy/pasted. If I'd to be Joe User, I'd be quite surprised
to see the quotation marks disappear on my copy/pasted text. That brings
up another issue:

When {white-space: pre;} is used, in browsers that I have tested (not
including IE) only Opera copy/paste in the format that is visually
rendered. The rest the pasted version looks like the style have not been
applied. I agree that if the format is crucial the <pre> element should
be used (again CSS is not supported or disabled cases) but from the
user's point of view I'd be quite disappointed and confused if my pasted
version differed from the original source.


-- 
               Regards, Zoffix Znet     

        ( http://zoffix.com ,   http://haslayout.net )