73 Untitled

“I love single letter tags” wrote Dallas Ransom. The problem with such tags is obvious though: they don’t describe what they are. What does Q represent? A “queue”? A “quiz”? In retrospect, from the point of view of XHTML and XML, such tags as Q, B, U and I were shortsighted. They should have been the word in full, eg: QUOTE, BOLD, UNDERLINE and ITALIC. Yes, sure it’s easier to type a single letter, but only if everyone knows exactly what it means. With the full word, there is no ambiguity.

What always irked me was that you had Q, but then BLOCKQUOTE! It would have been better to use a shorter word than BLOCKQUOTE. Or perhaps use a single QUOTE tag and allow an attribute to define if it were inline or not.

As for the debate at hand here, it strikes me that any approach requiring something the user is likely to turn off is not ideal, but there are levels of conformance we can hope for. Eg:

1. A solution that uses JavaScript. I say this is a BAD IDEA as some companies insist it is turned off. Users also may surf without it for safety reasons. (I know one who does.)

2. A solution that uses CSS. This is better than above, but there is still the chance that CSS is turned off. The stylesheet may also fail to load.

3. A solution that uses images. This may apply to people with slow connections who prefer to surf without images. Or again, the image may fail to load. I’m not sure which level of conformance is safer to allow for – people surfing with images off or CSS off.

4. A solution that uses a plug-in, such as Flash. Again, I know someone who blocks Flash, preferring to surf faster without it, so we need to consider such users. They are likely to be in the minority, but who knows?

5. Then there are combinations of the above. What if the user has turned everything except plain text off? Can they still see the quotes?

My advice would be to follow Mark Pilgrim’s note at the end of his post The Q Tag…

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/05/04/the_q_tag

…also linked at the start of this article, where he has chosen a server-side solution to allow for IE. Or we can use IE conditional comments as suggested in at least two comments here.

Be aware of a new bug in IE7 though! Comments can become elements! You can even style them! Unfortunately I can’t give a direct link as Textile is converting the dashes in the URL to deleted text! But a related article about this is here:

:before and :after in IE7 and below:
http://nanobox.chipx86.com/blog/2006/07/before-and-after-in-ie7-and-below.php

This may also be useful in tricking IE6 or 7 to use :before and :after to add quotation marks! Though I’m not sure it’s possible.

posted at 11:29 am on September 29, 2006 by Chris Hester

74 re: re: XHTML2 (picking up where first commenter l

Jeffrey Zeldman said:

XHTML 1.x is not forward-compatible with XHTML 2. This is by design of the W3C working group that is creating XHTML 2.

Fair enough. I’ll take your point one step further and note that the XHTML2 spec explicitly requests that the document not be normatively referenced, which in a sense renders any talk of XHTML2 here moot.

I guess, however, that I took this whole article and the ensuing conversation to be an “open” discussion on the subject of the <q> element. As someone else pointed out, the article unequivocally contradicts the existing XHTML1/HTML4 spec for <q>:

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.

I could be mistaken, but I read “must ensure” as a requirement that quotation marks be rendered by the browser, which negates the option of including them outside the q element as the author advocates.

I guess what I mean to say is, if I’m responding to an article that advocates breaking the current rules, I’m at least going to advocate breaking the rules in such a way that (hopefully) means following the rules at some point in the not-so-distant future.

To be honest though, after reviewing the discussion that’s ensued here, my conclusion is it’s not really worth using the Q element at all for now, at least not for me. I’ll wait for the day when XHTML2 or whatever else comes along defines it in such a way that we can all use it consistently without breaking any rules.

posted at 08:38 pm on September 29, 2006 by Jim Dalton

75 JAWS redux

Jim and Jon, many thanks for bringing this data to the discussion.

Thanks. I’m dismayed, though, that people are continuing to post comments promoting inaccessible markup, in which the punctuation marks are removed from the text. I understand that they want to comply with the HTML 4 spec. I just don’t understand why we have to comply with the spec when it promotes the creation of inaccessible documents.

From reading both the article and the comments, I get the impression that there’s a lack of understanding in the semantic design community of how screenreaders actually read HTML, and how blind people use web pages. Oh dear :(

posted at 09:47 pm on September 29, 2006 by Jim O'Donnell

76 Alleged accessibility

Absent actual test results provided by the author, I reject the claim that Q is somehow an accessibility benefit.

In languages that use different opening and closing quotation marks, including variants of English other than British, the use of such quotation marks accurately demarcates a quotation. The British English case is ambiguous because apostrophe and single closing quotation mark are ambiguous (also in Unicode); the same will be true of even-numbered nested quotations (using “ ‘ “ ‘ ’ � ’ � notation). Another ambiguous example would be Swedish, where opening and closing quotation marks are commonly both �. But there are many languages with unambiguous quotation marks. We’re supposed to use them for typographic correctness, and they work fine. Why do anything else?

This is indeed a solution in search of a problem. We don’t have to use a semantic element if we know it doesn’t work (Cf. OBJECT). Hypothetical semantics that break browsers or that break in browsers or that cause more trouble than they avoid are no good to us at all.

posted at 10:28 pm on September 29, 2006 by Joe Clark

77 Screenreaders

Erin: Thanks very much for fixing that and the superfluous repeated comment which I posted. :)

Question: how good is screenreader support for aural stylesheets? I gather that they are being phased out because it is bad to none, which is a real shame; if they did, it would be easy enough to add some audio for cue-before and cue-after to quotes, and maybe some other styling, since I suspect that:

John said [pause] quote Shall we go get some ice-cream? unquote

…would be rather nicer to hear read aloud (and not to mention less ambiguous) than:

John said quote Shall we go get some ice-cream? quote

(Strong emphasis above is meant to indicate that other aural styling could be applied to distinguish quotes.)

However, I confess that as Jim predicted, I didn’t know how screen readers read my quote tags until I reading this thread. At your implied suggestion I will download Jaws once I get some speakers/headphones. But since I’ll be moving back to campus tomorrow and probably won’t have time to get any in the next few days, I would appreciate it if anyone more knowledgeable would explain if what I’ve outlined is possible, and if it would even be preferrable.

Personally, I think the Q element is very useful, especially since the choice of quotes basically comes down to locale (which Q provides) and “house style” (which can easily be defined in the stylesheet). I don’t deny that quote marks themselves are perfectly meaningful, as much so as the question mark; I simply prefer to exploit the flexibility and simplicity which Q would provide if it were implemented correctly. Since I have a script and procedure to guarantee at least some level of functionality across most browsers and configurations (screenreaders excepted from comment due to inexperience), I generally use them without reservation!

posted at 04:47 am on September 30, 2006 by Jordan Gray

78 re: Screenreaders

if they did, it would be easy enough…

That is,

…if they did support aural stylesheets, it would be easy enough…

posted at 04:50 am on September 30, 2006 by Jordan Gray

79 Ah those days...

I remember that back in the day my teacher, a short woman packed with a great heart for teaching, told us about the q tag… This was back in the day of N vs. IE… love the memories.

posted at 08:18 am on September 30, 2006 by Ricardo Francés

80 localisation

Personally, I think the Q element is very useful, especially since the choice of quotes basically comes down to locale (which Q provides)

I’m not sure about this. An article from ALA, say, is written in US English, so uses US punctuation and marks up quotes with English double quotes. Someone in France might download the article and read it in English, but the quotes would remain English double quotes.

If the article were translated into French, then the quotes would change to French double caret marks, but this would be part of the translation process. The quotes would then remain French quotes even if the French article were read in the US by an English speaker.

So the punctuation of quotes is set by the author’s choice of language, in which case why have the user-agent insert the quotes? They aren’t going to change from one reader to the next, they’re part of the text content and, ultimately, control over them lies with the author, not the user-agent.

posted at 09:57 am on September 30, 2006 by Jim O'Donnell

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