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Re: Testimonial quotes and how to mark them up

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From: Lynn Holdsworth
Date: Dec 30, 2014 2:29AM


Thanks very much Yucca. In the page I'm working with, the quoter's
name comes before their quotation, and I think it's likely that some
users will get confused and attribute the quotation to the name that
comes after it. So I wanted to associate the two.

If this was my own site I'd use an ARIA label, but it's not, and I'm
only able to make recommendations based on WCAG2. I guess I must leave
this one alone because I can't think of an easy, WCAG2-dependent way
for devs to associate the name and quotation.

On 30/12/2014, Jukka K. Korpela < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> 2014-12-30, 10:44, Lynn Holdsworth wrote:
>
>> Do any of you have any thoughts on how to mark up short testimonial
>> quotes using HTML5? I want some way to associate the quote and the
>> name of the person who made it,
>
> The common practice is to mention the name before or after the quoted
> text, which is put in quotation marks. Long quotations are often set as
> blocks, with the name mentioned before it or after it on a separate
> credits line. Both quotation marks and setting as a block may fail to
> convey the idea completely, especially in speech rendering, but usually
> the context helps to understand where the quotation ends.
>
>> but <blockquote> seems like overkill
>
> In practice, it is just an indentation device. In theory, it should only
> be used for quotations extracted from an external source, not for
> original statements. A testimonial might be construed as a quotation of
> spoken words, in principle. Anyway, the semantics of <blockquote> is
> really just, well, "semantics."
>
>> and the <q> tag doesn't have any attributes to hook it to the quoter's
>> name.
>
> The <q> markup might now be appropriate for adding quotation marks,
> since browsers that completely ignore it have become rare. Yet, it
> normally offers no benefits over the use of quotation marks as
> characters. Using the latter, you can make sure that the correct marks
> are used.
>
> It seems that you are looking for a way to associate quoted text with
> the name of the quoted person (or other source) in markup. That's an
> interesting idea in principle, but mostly pointless. What matters is
> whether a flow of words as such makes it clear to the reader or listener
> that some part of the flow is quoted, where the quote starts, where it
> ends, and who is being quoted (and, quite often, where the quote is from).
>
> Theoretically, both <blockquote> and <q> may have the cite attribute,
> with a URL value, but it is supposed to refer to the source of the
> quotation, not the quoted person. The source could have markup of its
> own to indicate its author, but I don't think this is what you are
> looking for.
>
> Yucca
>
>
> > > >