Not so Smart Quotes
As Michael notes, Safari 1.0 Beta 2 now supports the <q> tag. Armed with this knowledge, I decided to try it out in a recent entry.
From the comments on Michael’s entry, I knew there were some oddities in the implementation of <q>, but I wasn’t prepared for the horror I saw when my posting was rendered — straight quotes on my beautifully SmartyPants-ified weblog!
I played around with a Safari, Camino, and bit of CSS and determined I can eliminate the drawing of the "s with the following CSS:
q:before { content: ""; }
q:after { content: ""; }
At this point, I started feeling pretty good about myself. After all, if I add the appropriate ASCII codes for “ and ” (“ and ”, respectively), I should be all set. Of course, this is what I saw in Camino and Safari.
I’ve perused the CSS spec, but I couldn’t find anything about whether or not HTML entities should be rendered. Anybody have some insight on this?
April 23rd, 2003 at 5:07 am
If you expect to use specific characters, html entities aren’t the way to go: use a hex code as specified in one of those ISO thingies. The table listed here shows you some of the common characters: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/generate.html#quotes
(I know you said you looked at the spec, but this is the piece that refers to same.)
The hex-coded character is enclosed in quotes in a stylesheet, and preceded with a backslash.
So, it’d be:
q:before { content: “201C”; }
q:after { content: “201D”; }
to get typograpically-correct English curlyquotes.
April 23rd, 2003 at 5:11 am
to clarify: the character hex-code spec is ISO 10646. Cause I know I sound sreally intelligent when I refer to stuff as ‘thingies.’
Also, the example I gave is for “doubles;” for ‘singles,’ use 2018 and 2019.
April 23rd, 2003 at 11:10 am
What? ‘Thingies’ is a perfectly technical term 🙂
I actually looked at that page in the spec last night, but completely missed what is was trying to say in the table. I think the approximate rendering of ” as '' sort of threw me off.
At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.