Yesterday, while sifting through blogdex, I found a link to a javascript authored by Merek Prokop that fixes Internet Explorer’s lack of support for the ABBR tag. Looking for further I discover that the source that introduced this link into the churn of Blogdex was Mark Pilgrim. I have been a lurker at Mr. Pilgrim’s site for many months now ever since he dropped massive science about web accessibility.
Anway, after reading about Merek Prokop’s hack, it occurred to me that one could use a similar trick to fix Explorer’s bad implementation of Q so I decided to mail Mr. Prokop about it and decided to mention this on Mr. Pilgrim’s site. Mr. Prokop replied quickly, I guess it was midday over in Czechia at the time, saying that the idea did occur to him right off but then two problems arose:
- How will the script deal with double quotes?
- And how will the script deal with quotes in different languages? Czech quote symbols don’t look like English quote symbols.
Also, the following day, (Thanks Mark!) Mr. Pilgrim posts two links to javascript hacks that attempt to fix the quote issue by Simon Willison and Stuart Langridge.
Isn’t the Internet great?