In Issue 224 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, we welcome to our staff someone we’ve long admired.

Krista Stevens brought a strong voice and vision to Digital Web as that magazine’s editor-in-chief. In addition to her editorial and managerial gifts, Krista has a fab eye for fresh writing talent. It thrills us to welcome her as A List Apart’s acquisitions editor.

We also have two fine new articles:

12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards

by Ben Henick

Slick tips and life lessons for the standards-challenged—which, on any given day, includes practically all of us. Semantic markup and CSS layout bring wondrous benefits, but at a cost of frayed nerves and bitten fingernails. Read this article and get fewer headaches. Author Henick last wrote for us in Issue 100. Here’s hoping we hear more from him, sooner.

Long Live the Q Tag

by Stacey Cordoni

“The Q tag has been around for nearly nine years, ever since the first version of HTML 4.0. Its purpose is to handle short, inline quotations that don’t require paragraph breaks.” For instance, the text I just quoted belongs inside Q tags. Trouble is, in all these long nine years, Internet Explorer for Windows (it’s awesome!) has never supported the Q tag. New ALA author Stacey Cordoni crafts a workaround.

Edited by Erin Kissane. Illustrations by Kevin Cornell.

Tags: alistapart, design, webdesign, semantics, qtag, css, webstandards

Filed under: A List Apart, Design, Standards

9 Responses to “ALA 224: Krista, Q tags & trench wisdom”

1. 
   Aaron Gustafson said on 26 September 2006 at 5:27 pm:

   Yeah, another ALA staffer not named Aaron/Erin! Seriously, it’s great to have Krista on the team.

2. 
   Des Traynor said on 26 September 2006 at 8:44 pm:

   There are hundreds of other places to find nifty JavaScript and CSS tricks, so we’re going to focus on what we do best.

   How does writing an article that amounts to “Here is a CSS trick, for the q tag”, merit publication in ALA?

3. 
   Derek Pennycuff said on 26 September 2006 at 9:04 pm:

   so is this bad news for digital web? they’re my 2nd fav web mag after ALA . ALA’s quality is more consistent, but DW’s production schedule is more consistent, and that’s important too.

   and what exactly does acquisitions editor mean? she’ll help you acquire all the talent from what little competiton you have and help foster in a new age of ALA as a globe spanning conglomberate?

   ;)

4. 
   Jeffrey Zeldman said on 27 September 2006 at 9:45 am:

   DW’s production schedule is more consistent

   We publish every other Tuesday, except on major holidays.

   what exactly does acquisitions editor mean?

   Krista will work with Erin and me to find articulate, passionate writers whose ideas and interests connect with where ALA has been and where it’s going.

   The web is in continual renaissance. It is constantly reinventing itself and exciting new voices are continually emerging from it. (That’s one reason I dislike applying numerical labels to the web. It’s like defining a particular historical moment as humanity 2.0.)

   There are more new web voices every day, which means there is more stuff to check out every day.

   We’ve been pretty good at finding new people with something to say and giving them a bigger platform on which to say it. We hope to stay good at it. Krista will help us do that.

5. 
   Krista Stevens said on 27 September 2006 at 11:27 am:

   The beautiful thing about the web is that we teach each other so that we, as well as it, might grow. There is no shortage of great, talented voices out there – many of them have not had the chance to share their ideas with the world. I am thrilled to be part of the team at ALA and look forward to working with new authors and bringing their voice to a wider audience.

   In Carolyn Wood, Digital Web has a crack editor in chief. She’s got a top-notch team and with her passion, vision and energy – look for great things to come out of DW.

6. 
   burun said on 3 February 2008 at 10:07 am:

   I’m experimenting with less well-known structural elements in HTML, including Q, which is supposed to be used for inline quotations. I already use the BLOCKQUOTE tag for longer quotations, and it would seem that the Q tag would be perfectly suited for a weblog, since so many weblog entries involve quoting short snippets of linked external articles. However IE 6 doesn’t display quotation marks; content in a Q tag just looks like everything else.

7. 
   estetik said on 29 September 2008 at 4:27 am:

   Q tags purpose is to handle short, inline quotations that don’t require paragraph breaks. Very useful tool to use.

8. 
   kop said on 19 October 2008 at 1:46 pm:

   How does writing an article that amounts to “Here is a CSS trick, for the q tag”, merit publication in ALA?

9. 
   Jeffrey Zeldman said on 19 October 2008 at 2:34 pm:

   @kop:

   Thanks for chiming. You’re a bit late—we published the article more than two years ago.

   We obviously considered it to be more than a “CSS trick for the q tag.” It’s a discussion about semantics in HTML that asks whether the q element makes sense (is it semantic? or presentational?), and—if one concludes that the element’s use is justified—offers a workaround for the fact that some browsers support the q element and other browsers don’t.