[marcamos]

How many front-end developers out there use the 9 year old <q> element when quoting inline text? To be perfectly honest, I haven't used it much (if at all) myself. I have always resorted to one of the following variations:

“Hello, this is quoted text. Supposedly.”

or

"Hello, this is quoted text. Supposedly."

But after reading a brilliant ALA article recently, written about the lack of use the <q> element receives, I now know why I never used it; it has never been and, as of IE7 Beta 3, still isn't supported by any version of Internet Explorer.

OK, so it makes sense. I never used it because I never heard about it. I never heard about it because nobody recommended it or wrote about it. Case closed, right?

Well, as usual, the strong advocates of proper code use, semantics and usability (my heroes) have fought back. One in particular has come up with a very easy way to reinstate the use of the <q> element and have it work cross-browser, and ensure that it doesn't backfire when IE version 37 finally supports it. It doesn't utilize Javascript and will not throw up any flags in the W3C validator.

Read: Long Live the Q Tag by Stacey Cordoni

[James Mitchell]

I too have never heard of it. Unfortunately, likewise I do not think I'll be using it anytime soon. It sure would make "proper code use, semantics, and usability" kosher, not to mention ease of CSS control, however until its supported its like using CSS3 multi-columns.

Till then I'll stick to either your two methods listed above, or creating a class to control it.

[moojoo]

IE doesn't like <abbr> either.. bastards! i think to date FF is the only browser that handles <abbr> without css styling. IE requires a bit of js to convert the <abbr> tags into spans and use the css style for it.

This post has been edited by moojoo: 27 September 2006 - 03:32 PM