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by Simon Willison.
Original Post: Fixing quotes with Javascript
Feed Title: Simon Willison: Web Standards
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Marek Prokop has a cunning way of getting Internet Explorer to style <abbr> elements (IE, for reasons unknown, usually ignores their existence both as stylable elements and through the DOM). A comment by Mr. Farlops on diveintomark inspired me to have a go at fixing IE's equally faulty quotes behaviour using javascript. Rather than detecting IE by checking for the presence of document.all, I decided to use a Microsoft specific proprietary extension: DHTML Behaviors.
The additional CSS required to use it (and to make quotes look pretty in better browsers), based on Mark Pilgrim's code from The Q tag, looks like this:
There are two main disadvantages to this solution: It introduces an invalid property to your CSS, and it could result in duplicated quotes in IE 7 should that browser finally fix the lack of quote element support.
Mark Pilgrim advocates using a server side script to mark up quotations with the relevant HTML entities. I'm not too keen on this solution purely because I tend to surf the web using Lynx 2.7 from University every now and then, and Lynx 2.7 displays some entities untranslated resulting in sites looking like this:
The guy in charge of “doing techie stuff for The Register”
emailed me today to say that The Register is now sporting a shiny new
RSS 1.0 feed. It validates and everything. Woohoo! Guess I’ll
have to find somebody else to pick on now. [winking face]