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RE: More on quotes

for

From: Jukka Korpela
Date: May 8, 2002 3:18AM

Mark Pilgrim

> IE on Windows (all versions) does not support the Q tag at all.

Well, "at all" is a bit exaggerating, but only a small bit: IE (at least
from version 5.5) _recognizes_ Q markup but does not _do_ anything with it
by default. Specifically, it does not surround it with quotation marks. This
is different from e.g. ABBR markup which not even recognized e.g. by IE
5.5/Win: I can use style sheets to tune the appearance of Q but not that of
ABBR. From the accessibility point of view, and otherwise too, this
difference is rather irrelevant, though.

> You can even use the Unicode representation for curly quotes (details
> here: http://www.alistapart.com/stories/emen/ ). This works on all
> browsers, even Netscape 4. Heck, even Lynx, which is smart enough to
> display them as straight quotes instead.

I've been thinking what to think about "smart" quotes these days. I used to
recommend straight quotes, since it seldom makes sense to take the risk of
not getting any quotes shown (or of getting strange characters shown), when
the possible win is just typographic improvement. But admittedly support is
fairly good these days, when adequate methods are used.

Yet, I hesitate, partly due to accessibility considerations. Think about the
problem that speech presentation software has with special characters - all
those myriads of characters that there are in Unicode and that might be used
on Web pages. It is reasonable to expect that they can handle the good old
Ascii quotation mark somehow, but they might simply not have been programmed
to deal with non-Ascii characters.

--
Jukka Korpela
TIEKE Tietoyhteiskunnan kehitt