Use HTML <q> Tag Instead of Curly Quotes for Smart Punctuation

[GiFuJo]

Problem

Currently, when enabling output.html.smart-punctuation, double quotes in the HTML output are rendered as curly quotes. However, these curly quotes are not appropriate or standard for many languages - as detailed in this overview.

Proposed Solution

Instead of replacing straight double quotes with curly quotes when smart-punctuation is enabled, the renderer should use the HTML <q> tag. This would allow browsers to render quotation marks according to the book's language metadata in book.toml with fallback options to the user's locale or browser language settings.

Notes

No response

[steffahn]

<q> elements in HTML have fairly bad/broken (and also browser-dependent) UX.

Compare e.g. the points raised at https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/10216