[dokuwiki] Re: pending patches?

At 21:15 +0100 UTC, on 2007-02-10, Anika Henke wrote:

[...]

[<http://alistapart.com/comments/qtag/>]

> One good question, though, from those comments:
> ----
> 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?
> ----

This came up on the WHATWG list recently, taking it even further: to mark-up
sentences as such, so you can for example style sentences into starting with
a capital and ending with a period. I'm sure that sounds insane to many of us.

Although I think that would in fact be useful in some situations, for
something like a wiki (which seems generally aimed at allowing non-techies to
easily publish things) it would be over the top. Along that same line I can
see why <q> perhaps might be too much even

[...]

> Inline quotations are rarely enough, so I would rather suggest a syntax
> plugin [...]

That might be an approriate approach, yes.

[...]

> IMO, much things about the <q> spec are just unreasonable:
> a) Why let the browser add the quotation marks? Quotation marks are
> punctuation and belong to the content.

Maybe. I think it's simply a matter of opinin, and thus, to achieve
interoperability, it's all about agreeing on exactly where to draw the line.
The only way to achieve that is through a spec that everybody can contribute
their 2 cents' worth to, and accepting that, just like with politics, there
is no way everyone will ever agree on anything :) We'll all just have to
accept certain things to seem 'wrong'. (We can all fight for them to become
'right' in the next spec, but in the mean time, the current spec is all we
have.)

> b) Being able to give <q> language-specific quotation marks per CSS is
> not a good argument, because the editor of a text should take care to
> use the correct quotation marks (for his/her language) anyway. And those
> should not be changed!

Same as above.

> c) Why do we have *two* different tags for quotation (<q> and
> <blockquote>), describing the very same thing? When the only difference
> is that one is an inline and the other a block element?

Interesting point. Yes, perhaps just an inline element would suffice. (To
actually get there, you'd have to discuss this with those working on the next
version(s) of (X)HTML though.)

> d) These two quotation elements have two *different* behaviours: <q>
> adds quotation marks (according to the specs) and <blockquote> does not!
> Why is that so inconsistent?

Might this not in fact stem from typography? (Something I really don't know
much about). In fact, the previous point perhaps does so as well?

Still, with only a single inline element, you could nest that inside a more
generic block element, which would still allow you to style such blocks
differently from inline quotes. Perhaps the argument against that would be
that this would make things CSS-dependant?

[...]

> I am not against using <q>. It has clearly advantages [...]
> But the disadvantages (see above, plus the fact that no living browser
> has fully implemented it yet) outweigh the benefits. At least in my opinion.

iCab has supported <q> for at least 6 or 7 years already. I'm not aware of
its implementation being incomplete, but I might be overlooking something.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>
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