91 Yes, IE is broken, but...

(Sorry – something weird happened to me post…)

Rob, none of these comments are meant to be facetious – just practical and factual.

IE is broken in terms of supporting the spec. I don’t think anyone has said otherwise. However, in my opinion, the spec should never have taken control of punctuation away from the writer.

Aural CSS never took off and support is very limited in browsers. If you find that dubious, run some tests. Screen readers don’t support CSS, browsers do. Screen readers rely on browsers for information. And JAWS is a well-featured screen reader. Aural CSS support will have very little impact on its market life. Now if browsers offered better supported and the screen readers and browsers “talked” more, that’d be great!

Incidentally, CSS2 Aural CSS is depracted in CSS3 in favour of the Speech Module, so I can’t see Aural CSS getting increased support.

How are quotation marks different to other punctuation? I don’t understand. In English, there are different rules for how quotation marks are used, where they are positioned, etc. Usage of punctuation requires human control over that punctuation, just as accessibility testing requires a human to run manual checks. How can you support that software should be in control of any kind of punctuation?

I’m not saying that the q element is worthless – it does add meaning to a document for software. But it is next to useless in practice at the moment. I hope this changes.

posted at 02:58 pm on October 16, 2006 by Jon Gibbins

92 Semantics in Q

Rob has a point when he says quotations don’t need to have quotation marks around them. I can imagine designs where quotations are displayed in italic, for example.

So there is a difference between meaning and layout, and I don’t see a reason why a browser should automatically add quotation marks. Quotations usually have quotation marks, but not automatically. By the way, does anybody know how quotations are handled in non-latin script languages like Japanese?

If the browser wouldn’t add them automatically, you could decide if you add them either manually in the code or with CSS :before and :after. Thus we wouldn’t have to discuss which way is best to get rid of them. I assume that’s the reason why XHTML 2.0 has dropped automatic quotation marks.

posted at 03:48 pm on October 16, 2006 by Martin Kliehm

93 A bit lost

Martin, I agree with you, but I’m a bit lost now. If Rob’s point was that quotations don’t need to have quotation marks around them (e.g. in different languages), it negates his point that IE is broken and the W3C Recommendations are correct.

(Also, would an editor be kind enough to delete my previous duplicate post? I have no idea what happened, but my comment didn’t appear the first time I submitted it and now there are two! Thanks!)

posted at 04:10 pm on October 16, 2006 by Jon Gibbins

94 Lost indeed

Jon, that’s right. It’s a contradiction I can’t resolve either.

posted at 04:58 pm on October 16, 2006 by Martin Kliehm

95 There is way too much confusion in this discussion

I don’t know if another post is going to help this, but let me try this again. First there’s confusion between semantic languages and presentation. Nothing has changed in the W3C semantic recommendations regarding the ‘q’ element (even in the draft XHTML 2.0 recommendation). The recommendation is that authors should leave off quotation marks and use the semantic markup of the ‘q’ element instead. The presentation is then handled by CSS (either through the browser’s default stylesheet or through an author or user style sheet). The second point I was trying to make that has failed to clear up the confusion is that quotation marks are [strong]not[/strong] like other punctuation. They are one of the ways quotations are presented. The other way quotations are often presented is as an indented block (particularly when the quotation goes beyond a certain length). I‘m not talking about different languages here, I’m saying in English in the same document quotations get presented in two different ways. These are the sorts of decisions that are best left to the publshing-time through style sheets and not hard-coded ito the semantics of the document. So having a semantic construct like the ‘q’ element is far superior in my view than hard-coding presentation into the document. When asking why should the author leave quotations up to the software, that’s a red herring question. The author is not leaving quotations up to the software. The author is authoring semantics in the semantic markup (HTML, XHTML, etc) and authroing presentation in the presentation portion of the software (CSS, XSLT, etc).

I don’t have easy access to JAWS, so I cannot test whether it responds to CSS directivves like the voice-family or pause properties. Again like IE, why do users and authors tolerate such poor software. Switching voices by CSS selector would be just as simple as adding generated content before and after the element for IE.

Also, it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say the aural CSS has been deprecated. The speech media type is largely a renaming of the aural media type. What is being deprecated there (as part of this renaming) are a few properties that were aural but didn’t relate just to speech (like aziumth). All of the speech related properties from CSS2 remain in the draft CSS3.

Let me finish by saying I think the conditional comment approach mentioned by Ian Oxley in post #56:

The problem is that IE will not then participate in the separation of semantics from style that the W3C standards make possible. But that�s true of many iof the other obsolete browsers as well. It’s merely another sign of the contempt Microsoft shows for its customers.

posted at 10:45 pm on October 16, 2006 by Rob Burns

96 Here's a screen reader that does support CSS aural

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/raman/emacspeak/emacspeak.html

posted at 11:38 pm on October 16, 2006 by Rob Burns

97 Another source of confusion

Looking over this conversation again I think aother source of confusion is two separate issues with IE. One (the more serious IMHO) is that it doesn’t support CSS generated content and the associated ‘:before’ and ‘:after’ pseudo-selectors. The second is that id didn’t support the automatic inclusion of quotation marks around the ‘q’ element. The second one is no longer important beacus it has been superceded by the CSS specification. If IE only handled CSS properly this would not be an issue for anyone. Authors who didn’t want to pursue a strict separation of semantics and style could do so by entering quotation marks in their HTML and not in their CSS. Those who wanted to separate semantics and style could enter quotation marks in the stsyle sheet and leave them off ot he HTML. We’d have a choice. Instead we have a MS pain in the ass.

This is what’s depicted in the XHTML2 draft examples. Doing it either way. However, that’s clearly based on the hope that IE either begins to support CSS generated content or that it continues its decline in popularity.

posted at 07:59 am on October 17, 2006 by Rob Burns

98 Punctuatioon

Quotation marks are part of the structure of a page, just like exclamation marks, question marks, capital letters and full stops. They add structure, and therefore meaning, to the text.

The TEI documentation has some useful discussion around marking up highlighted text which goes either way for marking up quotations.

The XHTML 2.0 recommendation. says:

Visual user agents must not by default add delimiting quotation marks (as was the case for the q element in earlier versions of XHTML and HTML). It is the responsibility of the document author to add any required quotation marks, either directly in the text, or via a style sheet.

Nothing to do with IE. Everything to do with the fact that the quotation marks may be important to the structure of the document.

posted at 01:38 pm on October 17, 2006 by Jim O'Donnell

99 Japanese and Chinese Quotation Marks

What would we do without Wikipedia? There are corner brackets in Chinese and Japanese, or think of quotation dashes common in literature. Automatic quotation marks inserted by the browser don’t make any sense at all.

posted at 03:09 pm on October 17, 2006 by Martin Kliehm

100 What year is this?

No one is advocating browsers automatically inserting quotation marks. No browser does this anymore. Back in the 1990’s they did. Every browser I am familiar with except for IE now supports CSS generated content and allows authors to use that for quotation marks. IE alone flouts this recommendation and thus creates this controversy.

posted at 10:01 pm on October 17, 2006 by Rob Burns