[whatwg] Comments and questions on Web Apps 1.0

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>> Since blockquote is so abused that it is useless for AI, allowing
>>> attribution within the blockquote would be practical.
>>
>> Attribution isn't part of a quote. How would you distinguish quoting an
>> attribution from quoting text with an attribution from quoting text that
>> happens to have its attribution?
> 
> Quotation marks:
> <BLOCKQUOTE><p>“There’s just no nice way to say this: Anyone
> who can’t make a syndication feed that’s well-formed XML
> is an incompetent fool.——Maybe this is unkind and elitist
> of me, but I think that anyone who either can’t or won’t
> implement these measures is, as noted above, a bozo.” –
> <A 
> HREF="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/01/11/PostelPilgrim">Tim
> Bray</A>, co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification</p></BLOCKQUOTE>

Note that reading BLOCKQUOTE in a different voice or announcing its 
presence is part of the feature set of JAWS and Window-Eyes, for 
example. Whether it's useful in practice is perhaps best judged by users 
of such software. Lots of (older?) sites misusing it for indenting may 
not in practice outweigh some other sites using it correctly. If 
BLOCKQUOTE is so poisoned that's it's genuinely unusable for demarcating 
quotations, maybe we need something else?

But if one were to adopt your suggestion, which quotation marks 
precisely should user agents use to work out where quotations begin and 
end? Given the trouble with specifying the generation of quotation marks 
for Q, is this really something HTML5 wants to specifying?

Also, how do you distinguish a quotation with credit from a quotation 
within a quotation? Or are you saying quotations inside BLOCKQUOTE 
should _always_ have surrounding quotation marks, regardless of whether 
there's a credit or not?

It seems to me dumping extraneous material inside Q and BLOCKQUOTE, 
without a distinguishing element makes matters substantially harder. And 
even if we had a CREDIT element as Simon suggests, I'm not sure how that 
would allow authors to "quot[e] text that happens to have its attribution".

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis