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ALA Considered Harmful.

The new A List Apart article about the quote element seems pretty bad in my opinion. I would have posted a comment there, but you have to register, so no thanks.

It mentions the following as a non-ideal solution, stating the problem as well:

Using JavaScript to render the quotation marks.

• Many people disable JavaScript, so the people using IE/Win with JavaScript disabled still won't see the quotation marks.
• Double quotation marks will appear if and when IE/Win fixes the problem in a future release.

First of all, if they fix the implementation, then you simply remove the JavaScript. And, what are the percentage of users with Internet Explorer, which have JavaScript disabled (OK, sure, in corporate environments maybe).

The "solution" which is touted mentions removing the styling in standards-complaint browsers, using the before and after psuedo-elements. Then you do the following:

...add quotation entities outside the Q tag and now all the browsers, including IE/Win, will display quotation marks-and we won't have to worry about the other browsers having double quotation marks because we overrode the Q style with our own.

WHAT? Are you serious?

So, you're adding extra physical markup, and styling out the specification implementation. Instead if patching the majority (of the minority) of users, with the use of JavaScript, only targetting browsers which have the issue, you're adding extraneous markup. And why must you add the quotes outside of the q element? Why? This is insane to me.

People in the discussion mention:

Until of course I viewed the page in a text browser and found the quotation marks were being displayed twice.

This is because obviously there is no CSS support in text browsers and without CSS support you cannot hide the text browsers default style for the Q tag which is to show quotation marks.

The JavaScript solution quoted above is disregarded in the article, because it doesn't accommodate a small minority, a specific browser with JavaScript disabled. Viewing a page without styles is probably a similar small minority, but you're messing with the hardcode instead of progressive enhancement, yet this is the solution?

Also brought up in the discussion is the question mark of internationalization, where quote marks are different in different languages.

It essentially removes good rendering behaviour from good browsers in order to facilitate bad mark-up behaviour by authors to accommodate bad rendering behaviour by buggy and soon-to-be-obselete browsers.

Exactly. You can discuss this on the Multipack forum.

Posted on 26th September, 2006, 11AM under Webdev.