in reply to Re^6: INS, DEL, Q tags now allowed in posts
in thread INS, DEL, Q tags now allowed in posts

Q is decently supported if you count browsers; not if you count market share. Which, you guessed it, means Internet Explorer doesn't really support Q at all, though any modern browser does.

Sorry for the late reply, and for being a bit crochety, but this has to be said.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you said <q>every modern browser does</q>. As far as IE, there are a lot of things it doesn't support, some of which are in fairly widespread use (alphachannel transparency comes to mind, and an assortment of useful CSS stuff), and yet, somehow, life goes on. Part of the design of HTML from the beginning was graceful degradation, and new versions of HTML — and websites — have taken advantage of this since circa 1995, going on ten years ago; it is normal for users of antequated browsers to not see all of your markup, but they can still read the content. As far as IE, it can no longer be reasonably considered a modern browser. It hasn't been meaningfully updated since time out of mind (6.0 came out when? And that was a pretty minor update; the last real feature added was Print Preview in IE 5.5, circa 2000) and is officially not scheduled for any further updates except for security (unless you count updates that pertain to OS/browser/filemanager integration, which will only be available as part of the OS upgrade process; whether those really would count as browser upgrades is debatable at best). Of the three major OS platforms most Perl users use, IE is an end-of-line hasbeen on one platform, a never-was lack-of-product on another, and horifically out of date with little hope of improvement ever even on its best, native platform. If people want to continue to use IE for whatever reason, that's fine; if they want, they can continue to use NCSA Mosaic; it's obsolete, but it mostly still works. They aren't going to see all the features of the web that way, though, and removing <q>unsupported</q> tags from Perlmonks isn't going to change that very much.

Yeah, I know, it's not a really big deal. We can always just use &quot;. It's not as if l10n is really an issue for Perlmonks, and it's not as if preview won't remind us to change out our quote tags, and it's not as if we can't edit our nodes and replace the quote tags ex post facto if we forget to do so beforehand. But I think filtering out a tag just because one legacy browser doesn't support it is misguided; legacy browsers are why HTML was defined in a way that allows it to degrade gracefully; the whole point of defining it that way was so that new features (though calling q tags a new feature at this point feels rather odd) can be used even if there are browsers — even very popular browsers — that don't support them.

<q>In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings.</q>  — Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68

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Re^2: INS, DEL, Q tags now allowed in posts (graceful)
by tye (Sage) on Aug 18, 2004 at 17:51 UTC

    I find your Italics or bold text silently becoming not Italics or bold because my browser doesn't support EM or STRONG fine. I don't find characters disappearing to be graceful enough, even for just quote characters. Quote characters can have a significant effect on meaning.

    If there were a set of HTML tags that didn't get filtered but didn't get listed in some official list of PerlMonks-approved HTML tags, then I'd be less strongly opposed to Q being in such a list. There is no such list. I consider it a very bad idea to promote the use of a tag that is likely to lead to confusion for a large fraction (a majority?) of our users.

    Some elitist label of "not modern" doesn't hold much sway with me. A large fraction of users is still a large fraction of users.

    - tye        

[reply]
      I don't find characters disappearing to be graceful enough

      q tags don't represent characters; they're markup, metadata. (They may be represented _by_ characters, but that depends on the browser, the stylesheets in effect, and whatnot.)

      Quote characters can have a significant effect on meaning.

      So can italics, boldface, images, or lots of things. But q tags aren't used where a literal " character is wanted; we have entities for that. q tags are used for marking up a section of text; they are in principle similar to <cite> tags.

      Some elitist label of "not modern" doesn't hold much sway with me.

      I wouldn't make that argument if graceful degradation weren't one of the three or four most important aspects of the design of the web in the first place. Should mail servers not support CAPA because not all POP3 clients know how to use it? Or maybe the clients shouldn't attempt CAPA, since not all mail servers are guaranteed to support it? We're not talking here about taking functionality or information _away_ from people who use old software; we're talking about making previously-unavailable functionality or information available for people who use newer software that supports it; people who use software that doesn't will see the same thing they have been seeing.

      In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings.  — Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68
[reply]
        But q tags aren't used where a literal " character is wanted

        You can say that *you* don't use them that way. You can claim that they *shouldn't* be used that way. I don't believe your claim *as stated*.

        If there were a way to enforce *how* Q tags are used at PerlMonks, then your argument would have more validity. But if we could do that then we wouldn't have to filter *any* tags (just prevent them from being misused).

        Bold/Italics change emphasis. Quotes can change meaning. Quotes can be used to reverse meaning.

        Anyway, the potential benefits from the use of Q tags at PM are minimal. We have enough problems with tags that are allowed but can be misused. I find the cost/benefit of adding Q as another such to be a fairly easy choice, though I don't find either side of the computation that great.

        And thanks for the education on Q tags.

        - tye        

[reply]

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