Suggestion: Revisit spec copy for quote need and consistency

[j9t]

The specification is inconsistent when it comes to when and how it quotes terms.

The same class of terms may be

• unquoted
• put in double quotes (as in “the term "properties"”)
• put in single quotes (as in “the terms 'character', 'encoding' and 'string'”)
• put in guillemets (as in “«[ "rootMargin" → lazy load root margin ]»”) [will be fixed by a proactive PR]
• put in backticks (as in “by checking `Origin` headers”)

There are a few problems with that:

1. In some cases, the quotes aren’t necessary—most oft the time because the respective term is already marked as code or as a term to be defined (usually marked in italics).
2. In other cases, it violates the idea of use vs. mention.
3. It generally is inconsistent, for empirically, terms in needs of quotes could use the same quotes.

(There’s also the problem of the characters not being the typographically correct characters, but this can be and probably was already handled separately.)

Filing this as I didn’t spot a similar report.

[j9t]

Not sure how sophisticated my search was for this (I took notes over a period of a few weeks), but double quotes seem to be significantly more common (~4k) than single quotes (~1k). These have probably been the standard so far.

[Kaiido]

Most of these are certainly part of the specs language, see https://infra.spec.whatwg.org

In particular,

• a term surrounded by double quotes in a monospace font denotes a string;
• backticks denote Byte sequences;
• guillemets denote lists, but in this particular case, «[ ]» denotes a Map.

Also, CSS values and properties (like 'overflow') are surrounded by single quotes, some may have other meanings too, but the case you exposed seems to be a direct quotation from a W3C text.

[j9t]

This is great context! How about the spec explains this somewhere?

(This would not solve inconsistencies and violations of use/mention, but would certainly help!)

[domenic]

They are explained in Infra, the dependency on which is already mentioned.