Comments on: Non-Quotidian Problems

By: Paul D. Waite

Paul D. Waite — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:37:19 +0000

the q tag is html’s semantic answer to an inline quote (as opposed to blockquote). why they have to render with delimiting quotation marks is anybody’s guess. some european countries use different punctuation marks for quotes

I think the idea is that browsers should render the appropriate quote marks for their locale. So in theory, in you’re browsing in France, elements should be rendered with the double-arrow-style quotes. I’ve never tested to see which browsers do what.

By: ramon

ramon — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 13:53:15 +0000

the q tag is html’s semantic answer to an inline quote (as opposed to blockquote). why they have to render with delimiting quotation marks is anybody’s guess. some european countries use different punctuation marks for quotes. so i support eric’s attempt at suppressing the default behaviour.

By: Callum

Callum — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 08:02:53 +0000

Just stop using q tags. That should work. Does anyone benefit from them? Why are quotations any more deserving of a dedicated tag than questions, sentences, clauses, or any other lexical units?

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 02:34:00 +0000

Well, I keep running into these little snags, Ben. It will happen. (Actually, it already has, but I’m trying to get all the kinks worked out before publishing it.)

By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 01:29:18 +0000

When is the reset.css getting its own URL as your promised Eric!

By: CW Petersen

CW Petersen — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 20:48:22 +0000

For :nth-child you might look to Alex Bischoff’s Alistapart article Keeping Your Elements’ Kids in Line with Offspring, though I didn’t see anything in it about siblings. 8^(

By: Aristotle Pagaltzis

Aristotle Pagaltzis — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 02:21:32 +0000

it’s ignored by Safari 2

So that’s what I was missing. Well, sigh.

By: Paul Chaplin

Paul Chaplin — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:57:19 +0000

Hi Eric,

I’ve only just replied to your comment on my blog, as I hadn’t seen it until now - apologies for not approving it and replying sooner.

I was also reminded of the cursor trick - CSS, while imperfect in implementation and arguably spec, can be rather convenient at times, given the way it’s designed. I’m quite entertained by content: normal; behaving differently in what I’d otherwise consider highly standards-compliant engines - I can’t quite decide which interpretation I favour (is there “normative spec” with guidance, I wonder?). Thanks for putting the time in on this.

@David Baron & Daniel: I discovered the CSS 2.x difference only four weeks ago, when browsing SitePoint’s nice new CSS reference - they had the content property listed as being in both CSS 2 and 2.1, but the none value wasn’t listed, and I was sure I’d seen it elsewhere before (they’ve now added it, after a friendly prod). I’m surprised to hear that Gecko doesn’t support it pre-1.9, though. It seems to work in Konqueror 3.5.8, but not the recent-ish WebKit build I’m using. Thanks for the heads-up.

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:40:40 +0000

Why don’t you just use “quotes: '' ''“?

Because it’s ignored by Safari 2, just like quotes: none.

By: Aristotle Pagaltzis

Aristotle Pagaltzis — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:24:50 +0000

Am I missing something? Why don’t you just use “quotes: '' ''”? That will set the opening and closing quote characters both to the empty string, producing exactly the intended effect. My testing hasn’t been thorough by any stretch, but I’ve had no surprises so far.

By: David Baron

David Baron — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:19:04 +0000

For what it’s worth, ‘content:none’ is a relatively recent spec addition; it’s in CSS 2.1 (partly to match future plans for css3) but was not in CSS 2.0.

(’quotes:none’ works fine for me in both Firefox 2.0 and in the latest Firefox 3 builds.)

By: David Naylor

David Naylor — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:06:07 +0000

The content: none seems to be working in Firefox 3 anyway…

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:50:42 +0000

content: none will be included in Firefox 3 (Gecko 1.9). You may want to test it there.

By: Devon

Devon — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:34:52 +0000

So now I’m curious which browser you were testing in