Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

The quotes property allows authors to specify which characters to use as quotation marks before and after elements. This may be useful for delivering documents with different styles of quotation marks based on audience (and style sheet) without having to go back and edit the document.

The value of quotes is one or more pairs of character strings. The first value is applied at the beginning of the quote, and the last value is applied at the close of the quote. This example specifies standard English double quotes at the open and close of a quote element.

q {quotes: '"' '"'; }

Additional pairs specify quotation styles for each consecutive nesting level, as shown in this style rule. Notice that the quotation marks that enclose the provided values must not match the specified quotation character (in other words, when specifying a single quote, use double quotes, and vice versa).

q {quotes: '"' '"' "'" "'"; }

The double and single quotes specified in this example render as the straight up-and-down ASCII characters. For curly quotes and other more sophisticated quotation characters, the characters must be escaped. In style sheets, characters are escaped with a backslash (\) preceding the hexadecimal Unicode code point (number). The (X)HTML method of escaping characters (&#nnn;) is not valid in style sheets. Character escaping is discussed further in Chapter 6.

This example specifies curly double quotes before and after quotations.

q {quotes: '\201C' '\201D'; }

Table 23-2 lists the Unicode equivalents ...