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Bug 7490 - Ambiguous phrasing of insertion of quotation punctuation in Q element
Summary: Ambiguous phrasing of insertion of quotation punctuation in Q element
Status: CLOSED WORKSFORME
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: pre-LC1 HTML5 spec (editor: Ian Hickson) (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All All
: P4 minor
Target Milestone: LC
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2009-09-03 15:07 UTC by Martin Kliehm
Modified: 2010-10-04 14:47 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

See Also:


Attachments

Description Martin Kliehm 2009-09-03 15:07:13 UTC
The current draft 
(http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-q-element) says:

Quotation punctuation (such as quotation marks) must not appear 
immediately before, after, or inside q elements; they will be inserted 
into the rendering by the user agent.

I think this could be phrased less ambiguous along the line of this:

Authors SHOULD not use quotation punctuation (such as quotation marks) 
immediately before, after, or inside q elements, because user agents 
MUST insert them into the rendering, unless the default rendering is 
overridden by CSS.

I'd appreciate if any people who are more experienced than me would 
shape this text into something that is suited to go into a draft.

See also http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/48 and http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Aug/1328.html
Comment 1 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2009-09-22 01:11:44 UTC
That particular paragraph is only saying the first part (what authors are to do). It's already a must:

# Quotation punctuation MUST NOT appear
# immediately before, after, or inside q elements

The second requirement, regarding user agents, is in the rendering section:

   http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#punctuation-and-decorations

If this doesn't address your comment, could you elaborate on how the statement is ambiguous?