Use HTML <q> Tag Instead of Curly Quotes for Smart Punctuation

[GiFuJo]

Problem

Currently, when enabling output.html.smart-punctuation, double quotes in the HTML output are rendered as curly quotes. However, these curly quotes are not appropriate or standard for many languages - as detailed in this overview.

Proposed Solution

Instead of replacing straight double quotes with curly quotes when smart-punctuation is enabled, the renderer should use the HTML <q> tag. This would allow browsers to render quotation marks according to the book's language metadata in book.toml with fallback options to the user's locale or browser language settings.

Notes

No response

[steffahn]

<q> elements in HTML have fairly bad/broken (and also browser-dependent) UX.

Compare e.g. the points raised at https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/10216

[GiFuJo]

Interesting read, I wasn't aware of those issues. In my case I would still gladly use the <q> tag despite the downsides, but I understand that implementing a "broken" element isn't ideal.

Even if there is no easy fix I still feel like the current implementation is awkward because it makes the content actively harder to read in some languages where curly quotes are used for different purposes or (in my case) the commonly used quote symbol is an entirely different one.

I'll see if I can come up with any suggestions.