Inline quotations: use q elements or not?
In an A List Apart article titled Long Live the Q Tag [sic], Stacey Cordoni suggests a solution that will enable Web authors to use the q element for marking up inline quotations and get quotation marks around the quoted text in Internet Explorer.
The recommendation is to mark up inline quotations with the q element (HTML tags vs. elements vs. attributes), manually add quotation marks outside the q element, and use CSS to hide the quotation marks compliant browsers automatically render at the beginning and end of q elements.
There is a lot of discussion back and forth on this subject, and, well, I have to admit that I’m not quite sure which is best here. Arguments for not using the q element at all as well as arguments for using it seem valid. My own use of the q element has also swayed a bit back and forth through the years, as well as what I have been recommending to others.
I do know that I would not use or recommend the method suggested in the article. Out of the available options, it actually seems like the worst choice.
If/when I were to use q elements instead of manually entering quotation marks, I would much prefer using the JavaScript technique described by Gez Lemon in Fixing Quotes in Internet Explorer. I would use conditional comments to make sure that only IE 7 and below run the script, just in case Microsoft get around to implementing full support for HTML in a future release. Yes, it relies on JavaScript, but at least it preserves the semantics of the markup and doesn’t punish users of modern browsers with CSS turned off.
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