Internationalized Quotes

one of the things HTML is good at is that it supports at least some semantics, for example for using quoted text by using the <q> element, if you are using a decent browser (specifically, not IE). you can even nest quotes and they will display differently. that's how good HTML can actually be when used correctly (and when used with a non-crappy browser).

the problem is that different languages have different rules for using and nesting quotes. so while decent browsers support quotes, they don't support them in a language-sensitive way. consider the following test file for built-in support for language sensitive quotes:

<p>Some <q>language-neutral <q>quotes</q></q>.</p>
<p lang="en" xml:lang="en">Some <q>English <q>quotes</q></q>.</p>
<p lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-US">Some <q>U.S. English <q>quotes</q></q>.</p>
<p lang="en-GB" xml:lang="en-GB">Some <q>U.K. English <q>quotes</q></q>.</p>
<p lang="de" xml:lang="de">Some <q>German <q>quotes</q></q>.</p>
<p lang="de-CH" xml:lang="de-CH">Some <q>Swiss German <q>quotes</q></q>.</p>
<p lang="de-AT" xml:lang="de-AT">Some <q>Austrian German <q>quotes</q></q>.</p>
<p lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Some <q>French <q>quotes</q></q>.</p>
<p lang="fr-CH" xml:lang="fr-CH">Some <q>Swiss French <q>quotes</q></q>.</p>

none of the browsers i tested actually display the quotes as they should be displayed; firefox and opera at least support nested quotes by using different quotation marks; safari is too stupid to properly handle nested quotes; IE is too stupid to even support quotes at all.

this means that the browers' built-in stylesheets apparently are not very sophisticated. correct language-sensitive quote formatting could be easily implemented by CSS code like this:

q             { quotes: '"' '"' "'" "'" }
q:lang(en)    { quotes: '“' '”' '‘' '’' }
q:lang(en-US) { quotes: '“' '”' '‘' '’' }
q:lang(en-GB) { quotes: '‘' '’' '“' '”' }
q:lang(de)    { quotes: '„' '“' '‚' '‘' }
q:lang(de-CH) { quotes: '«' '»' '‹' '›' }
q:lang(fr)    { quotes: '«' '»' '“' '”' }
q:lang(fr-CH) { quotes: '«' '»' '‹' '›' }

and if you look at the above HTML using this improved CSS for quotes, then firefox and opera are getting it right. both browsers even understand that de-AT is a variant of de and use the de rule as fallback, because there is no explicit de-AT rule. that's pretty neat. but safari still only supports one kind of quotes; is WebKit really that bad?

all of this simply translates to: if you want proper internationalization for quotation marks, don't trust the browsers. if you absolutely need quotation marks to be displayed (IE simply ignores <q> elements), you might want to insert them using scripting (don't insert them as text!), because IE once again does not implement standards.