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RE: Quote

for

From: Jukka Korpela
Date: May 6, 2002 1:23AM

John Middleton wrote:

> When using the quote tag and HTML entity, what is the best practice
> for HTML accessibility or a simple short quote (not block quote)?

Markup for quotations has often been discussed in various forums, and the
practical situation still is that inline quotations are best presented using
Ascii quotation marks, "Quote this". In special cases, you might decide to
use typographically correct, language-specific quoation marks, though
support to them is far from universal.

Accessibility considerations emphasize the importance of _reliably_
indicating something as a quotation. And Ascii quotation marks are probably
something that both user agents and users need to work with anyway, since
they are so commonly used, on the Web and elsewhere.

> 1. &#34;<Q>Quote This</Q>&#34;
>
> On Mac NS4 this shows up as double quoted.

And this is a correct rendering, since the HTML specifications explicitly
say:
"Visual user agents must ensure that the content of the Q element is
rendered with delimiting quotation marks. Authors should not put quotation
marks at the beginning and end of the content of a Q element."

Logically, what you have there is a Q element, indicating that its content
is a quotation, surrounded by Ascii quotation marks, which have no special
meaning in HTML, and consequenly a correct (if not _the_ correct) visual
rendering shows the quotation marks as such.

> 2. &#34;Quote This&#34;

That's equivalent to "Quote This", which is the safe way. There's no reason
to use &#34; instead of " in the textual content of an HTML document (as
opposite to attribute values), but it's correct of course.

> 3. or other? What? <Q>Quote This</Q>

That would imply a high risk of having the document presented so that there
is no indication of that text being a quotation.

--
Jukka Korpela
TIEKE Tietoyhteiskunnan kehitt