<q> and IE

[Jim Moe]

Hello,
I have been using <q> instead of &quot; for quoting recently.
Fortunately not much has been changed since it seems IE does not know what
to do with <q>! IE ignores it rather than rendering quotes.
Is this true?

--
jmm (hyphen) list (at) sohnen-moe (dot) com
(Remove .AXSPAMGN for email)

[David Dorward]

Jim Moe wrote:

it seems IE does not know what to do with <q>! IE ignores it rather than
rendering quotes.
Is this true?

Yes. IE doesn't support the q element.

--
David Dorward <http://blog.dorward.me.uk/> <http://dorward.me.uk/>
Home is where the ~/.bashrc is

[Stan Brown]

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 14:55:54 -0700 from Jim Moe <jmm-
li***********@sohnen-moe.com>:

I have been using <q> instead of &quot; for quoting recently.
Fortunately not much has been changed since it seems IE does not know what
to do with <q>! IE ignores it rather than rendering quotes.
Is this true?

Well, it's your experience anyway. :-)

But <q> and &quot; aren't the same thing.

&quot; is exactly the same thing as " -- it tells the browser to
put a " character there. (As such, there's hardly any reason to use
it.)

<q> ... </q> is how you can mark a quoted section of text -- in
theory. In practice, browsers don't agree on what to do with <q> ...
</q> (partly because
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#edef-Q> is wishy-
washy, so I really don't think <q> is worth using.

Hmm ... I guess <q> and &quot; are alike after all, since one is
useless and the other is nearly useless. :-)

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/200..._wont_help_you

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Wed, 16 Nov 2005, Stan Brown wrote:

But <q> and &quot; aren't the same thing.
Right, and <q> was an unfortunate design, although I can't say
I could have designed it better and achieved what they wanted
to do. Maybe they shouldn't have wanted to do that anyway...
<q> ... </q> is how you can mark a quoted section of text -- in
theory. In practice, browsers don't agree on what to do with <q> ...
</q>
Oh, I think *web browsers* understand well enough what to do.
At least in the simple cases[1].
(partly because
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#edef-Q> is wishy-
washy,
See http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#h-9.2.2.1

Visual user agents must ensure that the content of the Q element is
rendered with delimiting quotation marks.

Note the "must" in there. That's clear enough to everyone except
you_know_who.
so I really don't think <q> is worth using.
Obviously it's well known that this was another piece of HTML4 which
MSIE disdained to implement. But I must admit I had assumed they
disregarded it in the same way that they disregarded <abbr> ...

....however, take a look at this test, comparing IE with a web browser
of your choice: http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/tests/q.html

IE does not apply any styles to the <abbr> element, nor does it
pop the title up when one hovers over it, which seems to demonstrate
that they disdain to recognise abbr's existence at all.

But for the "q" it's different. They not only apply the styles which
I specified, but also pop-up the title when hovered. What they
*don't* do, is to display any quotes by default.

That might not be so bad if IE honoured either of the following
attempts, using either the "quotes" or the ":before" and ":after"
constructs from CSS2.1 sections 12.3 and 12.2; but it does neither.

Mozilla and Opera (the web browsers which I tried) happily produce the
result I was hoping for, though I'm not entirely sure why (the sceptic
would anticipate getting two sets of quotes for at least one of those
attempts, no?).
Hmm ... I guess <q> and &quot; are alike after all, since one is
useless and the other is nearly useless. :-)

I guess so :-}

Well, you can *style* your quote with MSIE, as I now proved to myself;
what I can't seem to produce are any quotation marks. Neither by
default nor with some CSS. Of course, one *should* regard CSS as
purely optional anyway...

cheers (E&OE, of course).

[1] it's arguable what the heck they're supposed to do with nested
quotes in different languages; the hints that are dropped in the HTML
spec itself are unclear, but they hint at something which is at
variance with such publishers' style guides as I have seen.

[Jim Moe]

David Dorward wrote:

it seems IE does not know what to do with <q>! IE ignores it rather than
rendering quotes.
Is this true?

Yes. IE doesn't support the q element.

ARRGGH!
I was all excited: I could have website that adapted its quoting to the
region. Double quotes for english-us; single for english-uk; etc., and let
the browser handle quote nesting.
<sigh> Another way MS has boat anchored the industry.

--
jmm (hyphen) list (at) sohnen-moe (dot) com
(Remove .AXSPAMGN for email)

[Garmt de Vries]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

Well, you can *style* your quote with MSIE, as I now proved to myself;
what I can't seem to produce are any quotation marks. Neither by
default nor with some CSS. Of course, one *should* regard CSS as
purely optional anyway...

Which is exactly why I think the quotation marks should be in the HTML
itself. They're content, not styling. If you start creating things like
<q>, why wouldn't you go on and create an <excl> element as well? Then
<excl>Hi</excl> should by default be rendered as "Hi!" in an English
environment, with some more space before the exclamation mark in a
French environment, and with an inverted exclamation mark at the start
in a Spanish environment. But that's silly, and so is <q>, IMHO.

--
Garmt de Vries.

[Leonard Blaisdell]

In article <11**********************@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups .com>,
"Garmt de Vries" <gd*****@hotmail.com> wrote:

If you start creating things like

<q>, why wouldn't you go on and create an <excl> element as well? Then
<excl>Hi</excl> should by default be rendered as "Hi!" in an English
environment, with some more space before the exclamation mark in a
French environment, and with an inverted exclamation mark at the start
in a Spanish environment. But that's silly, and so is <q>, IMHO.

But a speech browser should be able to interpret it differently and
produce it differently by inflection. And a [hold your breath, because
it's soon to come] context spider will be able to produce that exact
quote for search engines that do far more than they do now. I don't know
much, but I know that the exact meaning of speech will be far more
important in the future than it is now on the net. Well, I think I know.
And we're far from there yet.
How about a <scream> element for corporate sites or the disenfranchised.
Something like it is coming to a w3 near you.

leo

--
<http://web0.greatbasin.net/~leo/>

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Garmt de Vries wrote:

If you start creating things like
<q>, why wouldn't you go on and create an <excl> element as well? Then
<excl>Hi</excl> should by default be rendered as "Hi!" in an English
environment, with some more space before the exclamation mark in a
French environment, and with an inverted exclamation mark at the start
in a Spanish environment. But that's silly, and so is <q>, IMHO.

No, it's not silly at all. The problem with <q> is that it is poorly
designed and awfully implemented, and it was "invented" too late*) in
the development of HTML. The basic idea behind it is quite reasonable.

Markup like <quote>, <question>, and <exclamation> would be most useful,
if designed and implemented properly and used consistently. They would
help automatic analysis of texts, and they would let browsers uses
punctuation as appropriate for an environment. For example, in a
document in English, <quote> could be read in male voice (assuming the
basic voice is female), or rendered with ASCII quotation marks when
character repertoire is very limited, or with proper English punctuation
marks in a normal visual rendering environment. The text could be
copied as such for use inside a quotation, with the rendering software
handling the presentation of nested quotes.

*) The <q> markup does not degrade gracefully on browsers that do not
recognize it, so it should have been in HTML from the beginning, or
browsers should have been required _not_ to ignore tags they don't
understand but e.g. display the tags visibly or otherwise indicate the
presence of unrecognized markup. In fact, <q> could well have been in
HTML from the beginning, if HTML had really been based on SGML. The SGML
Handbook describes how markup like <q> for quotations could be utilized
in a way that I outlined above.

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Thu, 17 Nov 2005, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

*) The <q> markup does not degrade gracefully on browsers that do
not recognize it, so it should have been in HTML from the beginning,
You have a point. On the other hand...

<q> was in the draft HTML/3.0, and some browsers were already
implementing it by then, as far as I recall. Far from "coming too
late", the need for it had been recognised and documented early on,
but certain browser implementers adopted a "Not Invented Here"
attitude, which meant that it got taken out again when the
widely-available elements got codified.
or browsers should have been required _not_ to ignore tags they
don't understand but e.g. display the tags visibly or otherwise
indicate the presence of unrecognized markup.

Fair comment.

It's really a pity that there is no construct available in HTML which
would display some text (in this case a plain quotation mark) on
browsers which didn't implement it, but do something more subtle on
browsers which did.

[Lachlan Hunt]

Jim Moe wrote:

David Dorward wrote:

Yes. IE doesn't support the q element.

ARRGGH!
I was all excited: I could have website that adapted its quoting to
the region. Double quotes for english-us; single for english-uk; etc.,
and let the browser handle quote nesting.
<sigh> Another way MS has boat anchored the industry.

You could style them yourself with ::before and ::after to add the
quotes yourself, and use Dean Edward's IE7 script to add support for
those pseudo-elements in IE.

q:lang(en-us)::before { content: "\201C"; }
q:lang(en-us)::after { content: "\201D"; }
q:lang(en-us) q::before { content: "\2018"; }
q:lang(en-us) q::after { content: "\2019"; }

q:lang(en-gb)::before { content: "\2018"; }
q:lang(en-gb)::after { content: "\2019"; }
q:lang(en-gb) q::before { content: "\201C"; }
q:lang(en-gb) q::after { content: "\201D"; }

--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
http://GetFirefox.com/ Rediscover the Web
http://GetThunderbird.com/ Reclaim your Inbox

[Jukka K. Korpela]

(Sorry if this a duplicate. I have had problems with outgoing messages, and
it seems that this one didn't get sent when I thought it was.)

Jim Moe <jm***************@sohnen-moe.com> wrote:

I have been using <q> instead of &quot; for quoting recently.
Stop doing so. You win nothing but lose quite a lot. Even on advanced
browsers, you don't get _real_ quotes (language-dependent orthographically
correct quotation marks) but plain old ASCII quotation marks ("straight",
i.e. vertical, quotes), unless you do some extra work to define a suitable
stylesheet. If you want correct quotes, simply enter them as characters
(if using UTF-8 or windows-1252), or use character references or entity
references.
Fortunately not much has been changed since it seems IE does not know what
to do with <q>! IE ignores it rather than rendering quotes.
Is this true?

It is.

Well, IE actually _recognizes_ <q> (unlike <abbr>), it just doesn't do
anything with it by default. Since IE doesn't support generated content
either, you cannot use CSS to create the quotation marks. You could use

q { font-style: italic; }

to make your quotation appear in italics (and without quotation marks) on IE
- that might be acceptable in some situations. But then Mozilla, Opera, etc.,
would use italics too, in addition to using the quotation marks. There are
hacks to get around this, in an attempt to hide CSS code from correctly
behaving browsers and to serve it to IE only. However, such hacks often fire
back. It would not surprise me if IE 7 had a naive (ASCII quotes) support to
<q> but the hack you would use would not hide the style sheet from IE 7.

Besides, there are browsers that don't support <q> even to the feeble extent
that IE does. Most of them aren't probably important these days, though.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Steve Fulton]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

Right, and <q> was an unfortunate design, although I can't say
I could have designed it better and achieved what they wanted
to do. Maybe they shouldn't have wanted to do that anyway...

Apparently, they no longer want to do it that way. The q element has
been removed from XHTML 2.0, replaced by the quote element[1].

According to the working draft, "Visual user agents must not by default
add delimiting quotation marks. It is the responsibility of the document
author to add any required quotation marks, either directly in the text,
or via a style sheet."

---
[1] 9.8. The quote element <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-text.html#sec_9.8.>

--
Steve

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger
wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. -George Bernard Shaw

[Andy Dingley]

On 16 Nov 2005 23:10:41 -0800, "Garmt de Vries" <gd*****@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Which is exactly why I think the quotation marks should be in the HTML
itself. They're content, not styling. If you start creating things like
<q>, why wouldn't you go on and create an <excl> element as well?

The Spanish inverted question mark / exclamation mark is part of the
content for this hypothetical element. It's always applied, no matter
tha language of the host page, and it's only applied to Spanish content.

The French quotation marks <<...>> are applied to pages where the
context is French, even if the content is English or Spanish.

Within these contexts, an explicit ? character is right for the
exclamation and <q> (with language-specific rendering) is right for
quotation.

--
Cats have nine lives, which is why they rarely post to Usenet.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Jim Moe <jm***************@sohnen-moe.com> wrote:

I have been using <q> instead of &quot; for quoting recently.
Stop doing so. You win nothing but lose quite a lot. Even on advanced
browsers, you don't get _real_ quotes (language-dependent orthographically
correct quotation marks) but plain old ASCII quotation marks ("straight",
i.e. vertical, quotes), unless you do some extra work to define a suitable
stylesheet. If you want correct quotes, simply enter them as characters
(if using UTF-8 or windows-1252), or use character references or entity
references.
Fortunately not much has been changed since it seems IE does not know what
to do with <q>! IE ignores it rather than rendering quotes.
Is this true?

It is.

Well, IE actually _recognizes_ <q> (unlike <abbr>), it just doesn't do
anything with it by default. Since IE doesn't support generated content
either, you cannot use CSS to create the quotation marks. You could use

q { font-style: italic; }

to make your quotation appear in italics (and without quotation marks) on IE
- that might be acceptable in some situations. But then Mozilla, Opera, etc.,
would use italics too, in addition to using the quotation marks. There are
hacks to get around this, in an attempt to hide CSS code from correctly
behaving browsers and to serve it to IE only. However, such hacks often fire
back. It would not surprise me if IE 7 had a naive (ASCII quotes) support to
<q> but the hack you would use would not hide the style sheet from IE 7.

Besides, there are browsers that don't support <q> even to the feeble extent
that IE does. Most of them aren't probably important these days, though.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Robi]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote in message news:Xn****************************@193.229.4.246. ..

Jim Moe wrote:

I have been using <q> instead of &quot; for quoting recently.

Stop doing so. You win nothing but lose quite a lot. Even on advanced
browsers, you don't get _real_ quotes (language-dependent orthographically
correct quotation marks) but plain old ASCII quotation marks ("straight",
i.e. vertical, quotes), unless you do some extra work to define a suitable
stylesheet. If you want correct quotes, simply enter them as characters
(if using UTF-8 or windows-1252), or use character references or entity
references.

Fortunately not much has been changed since it seems IE does not know what
to do with <q>! IE ignores it rather than rendering quotes.
Is this true?

It is.

Well, IE actually _recognizes_ <q> (unlike <abbr>), it just doesn't do
anything with it by default. Since IE doesn't support generated content
either, you cannot use CSS to create the quotation marks. You could use

q { font-style: italic; }

to make your quotation appear in italics (and without quotation marks) on IE
- that might be acceptable in some situations. But then Mozilla, Opera, etc.,
would use italics too, in addition to using the quotation marks. There are
hacks to get around this, in an attempt to hide CSS code from correctly
behaving browsers and to serve it to IE only. However, such hacks often fire
back. It would not surprise me if IE 7 had a naive (ASCII quotes) support to
<q> but the hack you would use would not hide the style sheet from IE 7.

Besides, there are browsers that don't support <q> even to the feeble extent
that IE does. Most of them aren't probably important these days, though.

ISTM that M$ has their fingers in the XHTML2 <quote> definition
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-text.html#sec_9.8.>

"Visual user agents must not by default add delimiting quotation marks
(as was the case for the q element in earlier versions of XHTML)"

Although I can't do squat about it, I still believe <q> should be implemented
by all browsers and implement the language[-country] specific variations.
Also great would be the <exclamation> and <question> (or <excl>/<quest>)
implemented also with the i18n specific attributes.

<q lang="fr">Et l'espagnol dit <quest lang="es">Que</quest></q>
«Et l'espagnol dit ¿Que?»

<q lang="en-gb"><excl lang="es-es">I know nothing, I'm from Barcelona</excl></q>
'¡I know nothing, I'm from Barcelona!'
where a "speech browser" would say
quote (in a British voice)
I know nothing, I'm from Barcelona (in a Spanish exclamatory voice, by pronouncing
words in Spanish, thus giving the exclamation a Spanish accent, mimicking Manuel's
Fawlty Towers scene.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

"Robi" <[e-mail]> wrote:

Although I can't do squat about it, I still believe <q> should be
implemented by all browsers and implement the language[-country] specific
variations.

As a matter of reality check, nobody knows the variations. Some examples:

The Common Locale Data Repository, collected by the Unicode Consortium, has
completely wrong information about quotation marks. (They somehow got most of
the rules for normal quotes and quotes inside quotations mixed up.)

Microsoft Word (at least version 2002) gets inner quotation marks wrong when
you have a quotation inside a quotation in German.

Even for French, there is apparently no official position on the use of
quotations inside quotations (English-style double quotes are common while
some people still use single quillemets).

The CSS 2.1 draft (which people often cite as the CSS standard, despite its
own statement about its status) has the examples of using the quotes property
all wrong. The rule
q:lang(en) { quotes: '"' '"' "'" "'" }
might be apologetically explained as written for a very very special case (a
browser with good CSS support but incapable of using correct punctuation
marks and forced to use the ASCII replacements), whereas the rule for
Norwegian is simply wrong:
q:lang(no) { quotes: "«" "»" '"' '"' }
because the inner quotes should be curly - and single.
(See http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-CSS21-2...te.html#quotes )

Thus, even material created by usually knowledgeable people tends to get
quotation marks more or less wrong.

It is virtually certain that any web browser that would try to get the quotes
inserted in a manner that depends on the declared language would make serious
errors, even if we only consider a dozen or so most widely used languages.

Besides, there's even (accepted) variation within a locale. In several
languages, guillemets (chevrons) are commonly used in books, whereas
newspapers, memos, etc. use curly quotes.

An author should know the rules of the language he is using (and make a
decision between accepted practices).

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Pierre Goiffon]

Andy Dingley wrote:

The French quotation marks <<...>> are applied to pages where the
context is French, even if the content is English or Spanish.

What do you mean by "context" ?

[Toby Inkster]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

<quote> could be read in male voice (assuming the basic voice is female)

I'd quite like an audio browser to prefix any <quote> element with Lionel
Hutz (Simpsons lawyer) saying "And I Quote" and suffix it with Homer
saying "The Nerve!"

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact

[Toby Inkster]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

But for the "q" it's different. They not only apply the styles which
I specified, but also pop-up the title when hovered. What they
*don't* do, is to display any quotes by default.

With a tiny bit of Jscript though, it can be fixed.

els = document.getElementsByTagName("Q");
for (var i=0; els[i]; i++)
{ els[i].innerHTML = '"' + els[i].innerHTML + '"'; }

ABBR can be fixed too, though it's more unsightly script required.

Of course, this is not perfect, and relies on client-side scripting, but I
think it's an acceptable compromise for such a broken UA.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact

[Toby Inkster]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

For example, in a document in English, <quote> could be read in male
voice (assuming the basic voice is female)

<p>She whispered, <q>let's get out of here</q>.</p>

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact

[Tim]

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005 07:20:36 +0000, Jukka K. Korpela sent:

It is virtually certain that any web browser that would try to get the
quotes inserted in a manner that depends on the declared language would
make serious errors, even if we only consider a dozen or so most widely
used languages.

Apparently, even throughout a country the so-called standards change. One
of our Australian states, Queensland, apparently uses different
typographical standards than the rest of us.

Some time ago I tried looking for reference material on this sort of
thing, and was quite surprised to see them stating all sorts of things to
be done in some way contrary to elsewhere in the country. I seem to
recall quoting might be one of them, but I definitely remember other
things; like they were trying to suggest that we uses spaces instead of
commas as thousands separators. There were quite a few differences, yet
we're one country with one language, supposedly all the same.

--
If you insist on e-mailing me, use the reply-to address (it's real but
temporary). But please reply to the group, like you're supposed to.

This message was sent without a virus, please destroy some files yourself.

[Andy Dingley]

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005 10:00:22 +0100, Pierre Goiffon
<pg******@free.fr.invalid> wrote:

Andy Dingley wrote:

The French quotation marks <<...>> are applied to pages where the
context is French, even if the content is English or Spanish.

What do you mean by "context" ?

The language of the overall page.

[Andy Dingley]

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005 07:20:36 +0000 (UTC), "Jukka K. Korpela"
<jk******@cs.tut.fi> wrote:

As a matter of reality check, nobody knows the variations. Some examples:

Can international variations for quoting standards survive more than a
few years ?

[Doug Laidlaw]

Leonard Blaisdell wrote:

In article <11**********************@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups .com>,
"Garmt de Vries" <gd*****@hotmail.com> wrote:

If you start creating things like

<q>, why wouldn't you go on and create an <excl> element as well? Then
<excl>Hi</excl> should by default be rendered as "Hi!" in an English
environment, with some more space before the exclamation mark in a
French environment, and with an inverted exclamation mark at the start
in a Spanish environment. But that's silly, and so is <q>, IMHO.

But a speech browser should be able to interpret it differently and
produce it differently by inflection. And a [hold your breath, because
it's soon to come] context spider will be able to produce that exact
quote for search engines that do far more than they do now. I don't know
much, but I know that the exact meaning of speech will be far more
important in the future than it is now on the net. Well, I think I know.
And we're far from there yet.
How about a <scream> element for corporate sites or the disenfranchised.
Something like it is coming to a w3 near you.

leo

I have just been using a quotation mark. Nvu repaces it with &quot; but if
it is left alone, it prints anyway.

Doug.
--
Registered Linux User No. 277548. My true email address has hotkey for
myaccess.
Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.
-- Quentin Crisp.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Andy Dingley <di*****@codesmiths.com> wrote:

The French quotation marks <<...>> are applied to pages where the
context is French, even if the content is English or Spanish.

What do you mean by "context" ?

The language of the overall page.

So do you think that is a problem? The quotation marks are, of course, part
of the "context" and do not belong to the quoted material.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Andy Dingley]

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005 13:29:52 +0000 (UTC), "Jukka K. Korpela"
<jk******@cs.tut.fi> wrote:

So do you think that is a problem?

No I don't think it's a problem. I think everything is just about
wonderful. HTML is perfect, the sky is blue and the pigs are tweeting
pleasingly up in the trees.

[Robi]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote in message news:Xn*****************************@193.229.4.246 ...

Robi wrote:

Although I can't do squat about it, I still believe <q> should be
implemented by all browsers and implement the language[-country] specific
variations.
As a matter of reality check, nobody knows the variations. Some examples:

The Common Locale Data Repository, collected by the Unicode Consortium, has
completely wrong information about quotation marks. (They somehow got most of
the rules for normal quotes and quotes inside quotations mixed up.)

That is bad! Especially by a consortium that should know their characters...
Microsoft Word (at least version 2002) gets inner quotation marks wrong when
you have a quotation inside a quotation in German.
here I'm not surprised, ant that's brobably why M$ doesn't quote <q>

[...] An author should know the rules of the language he is using (and make a
decision between accepted practices).

and be able to set (change) quotation marks at will in the CSS definition ;-)

[Robi]

Robi wrote:
[...]

here I'm not surprised, ant that's brobably why M$ doesn't quote <q>

WOAH!!! ant? brobably? that should be "and" and "probably"!!!
looks like the hard and soft consonants got switched on my <kbd> ;-)

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Toby Inkster wrote:

With a tiny bit of Jscript though, it can be fixed.

els = document.getElementsByTagName("Q");
for (var i=0; els[i]; i++)
{ els[i].innerHTML = '"' + els[i].innerHTML + '"'; }

It's interesting, but as you say, it relies on client-side scripting. So
it would be acceptable (in the WWW context) normally only when it is not
necessary to indicate quoted words as quoted.

If you use such a method, note that the script code needs to be placed
at the end of the body element. I naively tried putting the <script>
element into <head>, and at that point, the body has not been parsed so
the there are no <q> elements to play with.

A browser that supports the technique can normally be expected to handle
"smart" quotation marks, so you might just as well use adequate
language-dependent quotation marks. E.g., for US English,

els[i].innerHTML = '“' + els[i].innerHTML + '”'

[Eric B. Bednarz]

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jk******@cs.tut.fi> writes:

Toby Inkster wrote:

els = document.getElementsByTagName("Q");
for (var i=0; els[i]; i++)
{ els[i].innerHTML = '"' + els[i].innerHTML + '"'; }

If you use such a method, note that the script code needs to be placed
at the end of the body element. I naively tried putting the <script>
element into <head>, and at that point, the body has not been parsed
so the there are no <q> elements to play with.

Usually you'd rather stick it in an anonymous function called with the
window object's onload event (or in a function that is called by an
anonymous ...).

After verification that the getElementsByTagName method is actually
supported and that the CSS quotes property can be changed by the script
too and that getting the computed style for that property is supported
as well, it should all be a piece of cake.