Re: adding commas to quote elements

Marek Mänd <cador.soft (AT) mail (DOT) ee> wrote:

q:after{content:',"'}

In addition to the issue of adding commas or full stops or whatever
(which you could handle by using classes, thereby creating extra
complication into the markup), it is remarkable how people manage to add
_wrong_ quotation marks when they try to use <q> and generated content.

The Ascii quotation mark " is not a correct quotation mark in English, or
in any other human language. It has been used for some decades due to the
restrictions imposed by typewriters and early computers, but why would
you use elaborated modern techniques to generate the dull and wrong
Ascii quotation marks? You can use them much simpler, and much more
reliably simply by typing them into document content, as you type commas,
full stops, semicolons, quotation marks, and other punctuation - no need
to rely on CSS _and_ on support to the <q> element (which is being phased
out in XHTML 2.0, by the way).

It's not just a matter of casual mistakes, or a matter of simplistic
examples. Even the CSS 2.0 specification, and even the CSS 2.1 draft (or
"proposed recommendation", if you wish to make it sound more official),
the examples (using the quotes property, but this is a technicality)
manages to get _both_ examples (English and Norwegian) wrong
( http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/generate.html#quotes-specify ).
So if _they_ get this all wrong, authors can hardly be expected to do
much better.

Summary: Don't do quotes in CSS. If you don't know orthography and
typography, use Ascii quotation marks " (and Ascii apostrophes ' as
single quotation marks) throughout. If you do, write the correct
quotation marks into HTML documents in a suitable manner, such as
directly utf-8 encoded data, or character references, or (in some cases)
as entity references. But make sure you know the correct punctuation;
check it from reliable references. And don't do quotes in CSS.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets:

The Ascii quotation mark " is not a correct quotation mark in English, or
in any other human language.

I disagree.

Summary: Don't do quotes in CSS.

I agree.

--
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/