11 q is beyond help

Paul Waite: “It essentially removes good rendering behaviour from good browsers in order to facilitate bad mark-up behaviour by authors to accommodate bad rendering behaviour by buggy and soon-to-be-obselete browsers.”

If only this were true! IE7 doesn’t support the q tag either, and (much as may wish it weren’t so) will soon be the majority browser.

What meaning does <q> confer that a quotation mark doesn’t? I’m not an expert on screenreaders, but I’d bet they all say the same thing when they encounter an open q tag as they do when they encounter an &ldquo; or a &quot;.

Sadly, when it’s come to a hack like this – which, I have to say, doesn’t even fix the problem – it’s time to drop the dream of smart quotation marks in HTML; pausing to notice the many other scraps of meaning not conferred by hypertext markup: proper nouns, geographical locations, recipes, … ; and get on with our lives.

posted at 01:08 pm on September 26, 2006 by Chris Ovenden

12 I don't like the solution

I don’t see why we should remove the quotes from all other browsers to get it in IE working. If you see your solution (and as I just have discovered in the first comment to this post: Also in XHTML 2) from the semantic side, you get the quotation marks as part of a text, which is not right.
Here is an example of what I mean:

Did you know &ldquo;<q>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog</q>&rdquo; contains every letter of the alphabet?

If you break this down you get these parts:

1. Normal text: Did you know &ldquo;
2. Quote: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

1. Normal text: rdquo; contains every letter of the alphabet?

So we get a correct quote (without the quotation marks), but two parts of text that have quotation marks in it. If I see the “semantic” as a part of efford making computer programs help to understand websites, I have two quotation marks that make no sense:
From a program point of view, they are a part of the paragraph. So if you cut the <q> out you still have the quotation marks which are now indicating what?

posted at 01:24 pm on September 26, 2006 by Little Ant

13 Untitled

Chris Ovenden: “What meaning does <q> confer that a quotation mark doesn’t?”

It is supposed to adhere to locale-settings. E.g. There are different quotation-marks in norwegian than in english. So when <q> is descendant of an element which, or it self does containt a lang-attribute it is supposed to render the correct quotation marks.

posted at 01:53 pm on September 26, 2006 by Michael Odden

14 MEANING

Michael, what you describe is functionality, not meaning. A pair of quotation marks has the same meaning as a pair of q tags – what’s inside is a quotation – although, as you say, one is locale-specific. Should we introduce a <quest> tag that surrounds all questions, so that, say, in a Spanish locale the upside-down question mark appears at the beginning of the line? Perhaps, but it’s a forlorn hope.

It would be lovely if q did what it was supposed to do in all browsers, but it doesn’t. And – given that it will continue to wither for the lifecycle of IE7 – it probably never will.

posted at 02:05 pm on September 26, 2006 by Chris Ovenden

15 Otra solución "genial"

Me parece una solución tan “genial” como “semántica”. La fuerza de la etiqueta “q” es indudable, y no tener que implementar más marcado es siempre de agradecer. Brillante.

posted at 02:07 pm on September 26, 2006 by Enrique Rodriguez

16 “What meaning does confer that a quotation m

A <q> tag is meant for quotations only, whereas a quotation mark has multiple uses like slang words, technical terms or a title of a book.

A screenreader could then do things like read the <q> tag in a different voice since it knows for sure that it is dealing with a quotation.

posted at 03:02 pm on September 26, 2006 by Adrian D

17 What about disabled CSS?

If user disables CSS, or uses device that does not support CSS, she will se double quotes, right?

posted at 03:30 pm on September 26, 2006 by Darko Antanasijevic

18 Thinking aloud

IE apparently will support generated content in later releases. Then what happens?

I thought of a wacky solution. No flames please. How about defining the quotation marks as a tiny image and adding them to the Q tag that way? It would work for the start of the tag (by using padding), but I’m not sure how to do the end of the tag, without using generated content for IE6 and below, which doesn’t support that.

posted at 03:40 pm on September 26, 2006 by Chris Hester

19 By catering to one crowd, you're hurting another

I have a large quarrel with this article: it assumes that the people using IE with disabled javascript outweighs, or rather, is more important, than those who use screen readers or text browsers because they have low vision or are blind. I can’t imagine how hard it must be already to get information on the web using a screen reader, but this would definitely just start making it more difficult.

posted at 05:00 pm on September 26, 2006 by Paul Armstrong

20 for who?

I must admit, to my chagrin, that in all my years, I haven’t even heard of the <Q> tag until I read Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML by Elisabeth Freeman & Eric Freeman. I don’t even think Lynda’s (Lynda Weinman) famous HTML book mentioned it. I’ve always used “ and ”. My question is, that if that works, why bother with a tag that doesn’t? It seems like overkill to try to force recognition of a tag that doesn’t function properly.

posted at 05:28 pm on September 26, 2006 by Al Lemieux