Does It Go Inside Or Outside?
This week I was going to be writing a review of the Wordpress desktop application, MarsEdit. But thats not going to happen now, because I just found something of great interest over at CSS-Tricks.
Today, Chris Coyier published a post on punctuation in relation to tags. Where should the tags go? Inside? Or Outside?
There is probably a right and wrong answer
Above is the first few words of Chris’s post on this topic. I believe that here he is wrong. I don’t think that there is a right or a wrong answer. I think it is all down to context. For example, if I want to emphasis an entire question then I would place the tags on the outside like so:
<em>What do you think?</em>
In this situation I have emphasised the entire post. On the other hand if I am in the need of emphasising just a particular part of the question then the tags would go inside.
What do <em>you</em> think?
So, now lets take a look at the quotations that Chris used.
Was that really Meg Ryan in Cherry 2000?
This is the first question that Chris asked. Personally, in this case I think that the tags need to come inside. So, it would be formatted like so:
Was that really Meg Ryan in <em>Cherry 2000</em>?
So, why did I come to this conclusion? The punctuation in this case does not make sense when applied to the question mark. I think it has to be around the name only.
No, that was Melanie Griffith.
In this case I think it has to go outside.
<em>No,</em> that was Melanie Griffith.
Why did I choose outside this time? In this case to me it feels like the comma is attached to the word “No”, and so as a result it must be included.
In the Third Robot War (see page 85) human were decimated…
In this final example it seems to me that it should go inside the brackets. Why? Because you are emphasising the contents of the brackets, not everything around them.
In the Third Robot War (<em>see page 85</em>) human were decimated…
But hey, thats just my view. What do you think?
Comment by Chris Coyier — 22 January 2010
I was pretty sure that as soon as I posted it, someone would quote something from some official style guide that explains exactly what to do in every circumstance. That hasn’t happened, so it kinda proves this is muddy waters and subject to interpretation.
My personal opinions so far are that I agree with you on #1 (Question mark outside), disagree on #2 (comma should be outside), and disagree on #2 (tags should go outside of parens).
I think in the case of parens, it would be weird to have an italic word in straight-up-and-down parens, like the last letter might be at a tilt and bump into the close paren.
Comment by Daniel Groves — 22 January 2010
I think that the debate being caused really does show just how hard it is to comment. To be honest, if I was to do the same post in a months time I would probably end up coming to a different conclusion.
I might actually do it again in a few weeks, just to see if what I write does change.