Laurabelle’s Blog

Generally I do my best to make sure that my web pages are accessible in a wide variety of browsers. However, occasionally when a modern browser neglects to support some bit of HTML or CSS, I make a conscious decision to leave it be, and possibly to make people more aware of the suckiness of their browsers. (All browsers suck. Some just suck more than others.) IE is now one of those cases, because it doesn't support the q tag, which has been in the HTML 4.0 specification since 1998. We're going on five years here, folks. Get with the program.

You're probably wondering why I'm using q in the first place. You may even be wondering what the heck it is. q is short for quote and is the in-line equivalent of blockquote, which IE does support, by the way. Both of these tags mark the text between them as a quotation from some other source, but one of them does it within the flow of text, and the other separates it out on its own, in another text-block.

Part of the reason I use these tags for quoted text is that I believe it makes my pages more accessible for tools other than visual browsers, such as screen readers; it's semantic markup rather than the purely visual makeup of typed-in quotation marks. If I wanted to get into aural style sheets and were typing in a story or something, I could even specify a voice for different characters, or whatever. Proper structural, meaningful markup makes cool things like that really simple. This leads me into the other reason I use these tags, which is that I can do neato-cool things like put curly quotation marks around my quoted material, as Mark Pilgrim explains in the link above. I actually figured that all out by reading the CSS2 specification, before I read Mark's page, but it explains the concept so well that I'm not going to retype it. Just go read it, because it's really cool, and if you're using a browser in which this fake quoted text doesn't have quotation marks around it, you may want to think seriously about downloading Mozilla or even Phoenix. It's really sad that such a standards-incompliant, feature-poor browser as IE has such a huge market share.

While I'm on the subject of IE-bashing, I'd also like to point out that I hate the fact that IE indents the lists in my left navigation bar even though my stylesheets say not to. All together now: How Microsoft is that?