Quotes in the title attribute

[e.k]

This is to discuss quotes in the title attribute. In Markdown.pl, title is used for links and images.

From “Issues we MUST resolve before 1.0 release”:

@jgm

Michel Fortin notes, regarding nested quotes in titles:

There sure is room for more consistency with various quote styles and disallowing non-sensial combinations of " and ). But take note:

1. stmd is the only implementation not supporting unescaped quotes. https://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?normalize=1&text=Foo+[bar](%2Furl%2F+"Title+with+"quotes"+inside").
2. neither Markdown.pl, PHP Markdown, nor many other parsers let you escape a double quote (or a single quote), so the obvious solution is unfortunately non-portable and you’ll have to recommend using ". https://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?normalize=1&text=\"quotes\"

I replied:

It seems to me that the backslash-escapes should work in these contexts. There’s no clear reason why they should be disallowed; they are clearly useful; and the syntax description never says that they don’t work in these contexts. Allowing them to work removes 50% of the motivation for allowing nested quotes. Allowing you to use other quote types for titles across the board (’ or ()) removes another 25%. Or so I reasoned, anyway. There is a backwards-compatibility concern, which is serious, though I’ll bet the cases affected are very rare.

See https://github.com/jgm/CommonMark/issues/308

I think both backslash escapes and nested quotes should be allowed.

I agree with @jgm on backslash escapes, but I do not think allowing them and other quote types removes “motivation for allowing nested quotes”.

Using nested quotes is probably the most natural and easy way to write titles with quotes. It also has greater readability than using backslash escapes or " (but, I concede, less than using double and single quotation marks – e.g., "Title with 'quotes' inside", 'Title with "quotes" inside').

Nested quotes are easy to read and easy to write. They are in line with the philosophy of Markdown. It is a mistake to disallow them.