Discuss: Long Live the Q Tag

by Stacey Cordoni

51 Re: Re: Q Tag

We decided to leave it “q tag�? because we usually go for conversational style unless it causes confusion. I tend to think that anyone passionate about the q element isn’t likely to be confused about it.

Yeah. As you will enjoy it when your car mechanic calls tyres “the things at the bottom of the car”, right? “Q tag” (above all, in the headline, @John) is just false, and neither “conversation style” nor “anyone passionate” will change that. Sorry. (No, I’m not, but it sounds polite.)

posted at 12:48 am on September 28, 2006 by Jens Meiert

52 Unproductive

For me, this was a truly unproductive article. This hardly constitutes “best practices.” I’d go as far as to say that this article should be removed from ALA for its suggestions and its inconsistencies. Not only does the article encourage someone to make their markup inaccessible, it completely bungles the idea of creating Standards Compliant markup.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#h-9.2.2

Imagine if thousands of web developers actually took the recommendations in this article and created millions of web pages that completely disregard the W3C standard. We’d have billions of embedded quote characters in our markup that shouldn’t be there. Now try browsing these articles from a mobile phone or a screen reader.

I honestly can’t think of a bigger disservice for the web from the ALA than the recommendations in this article.

posted at 01:02 am on September 28, 2006 by Bill Wilson

53 Cite is Better for Book Titles

The <cite> element, which “Contains a citation or a reference to other sources,” is better for titles of books than the <q> element. Book titles in English are usually in italics, not quotation marks. Of course, you’d need to make <cite>s italic in your style sheet, but they’re more accurate than <q>s.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1

Discussion here:
http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2003/09/23/simplequiz_part_viii_titles.html

posted at 01:36 am on September 28, 2006 by Kirk Franklin

54 JAWS and

Once the page is processed and the Q tags are replaced with quotation marks, JAWS will no longer recognize that as a quote.

Sorry, this seems to be incorrect – JAWS 7.10 will announce speech marks embedded in the text, but ignores speech marks generated by the <q> tag. There’s some discussion here, including a test with JAWS in Firefox and IE:
http://accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=6256

posted at 02:28 am on September 28, 2006 by Jim O'Donnell

55 A forward compatible effort

From what I’ve seen, the best solution is from as days pass by as it will determine if the browser supports the style.

There is, of course, one major downside to the solution: it uses Javascript. If a user turns off Javascript, then this solution falls flat on its face.

Other than that, it is feasible to modify the code so it checks for nested quotes, and the markup is still semantically correct. This also works in Lynx, and while I haven’t tested it, I suspect it would play nicely with screen readers as well.

I’m not sure that I agree with the idea of punishing those browsers that are closer to standards; forcing compliant browsers to remove the quotes as we add them in by hand seems like an accident waiting to happen. As many have mentioned already, the end result is semantically incorrect, and you’re doing a disservice to the developer to require them to add both quotes and the <q></q> tags.

Much of what is preached in this publication is about the separation of structure from style and presentation, and the solution proposed by Ms. Cordoni goes against this ideal.

To be fair, when designing a site, you must take your audience into consideration, and as a vast majority of Internet users browse with Internet Explorer, the quirks of that browser must always be taken into account. I would caution developers to carefully weigh the benefits of a solution like that proposed in the article against the costs associated with alienating or depriving service from those with disabilities (especially in light of recent legal actions targeting Target).

posted at 07:50 am on September 28, 2006 by Adam Wilson

56 What About Conditional Comments?

Would it be simpler to just add quotes within conditional comments for IE/Win

e.g. Did you know <!—[if IE]>“<![endif]—><q>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog</q><!—[if IE]>”<![endif]—> contains every letter of the alphabet?

posted at 11:27 am on September 28, 2006 by Ian Oxley

57 Accessibility

Adam Wilson – I would caution developers to carefully weigh the benefits of a solution like that proposed in the article against the costs associated with alienating or depriving service from those with disabilities (especially in light of recent legal actions targeting Target).

I’d say the Target lawsuit is, frankly, irrelevant scaremongering here. The technique in this article is fully accessible to screenreaders.

Omitting the quote marks, as per the HTML spec, would make the quoted text inaccessible in JAWS, at least.

This is a case where the HTML 4 spec gets it wrong. The fix is to remove the UA-generated quotes, via CSS, as suggested in this article.

JAWS test cases
(thanks to Jon Gibbins for those.)

posted at 11:48 am on September 28, 2006 by Jim O'Donnell

58 Fascinating

Jim,

If JAWS and other screenreaders don’t use the <q> tag, then why should anyone use it in their markup? It’s a shame that the HTML spec is so far off base.

Does anyone know of any browser, application or utility that actually makes use of the <q> markup?

It seems to me that if the XHTML2 spec requires that UAs not add quotes to <q> tagged content, and screenreaders ignore the tag, then the tag serves no purpose and we should be using quotes in our source code exclusively.

posted at 01:39 pm on September 28, 2006 by Adam Wilson

59 Why use ?

If JAWS and other screenreaders don’t use the <q> tag, then why should anyone use it in their markup? It’s a shame that the HTML spec is so far off base.

I guess it’s no less useful than <dfn>, <kbd>, <cite>, <code> and all those other wierd little inline phrase elements. You might want to style inline quotes with CSS, for example. <q> would give you a markup hook to use for that.

posted at 01:58 pm on September 28, 2006 by Jim O'Donnell