You could use the q
element instead of quotation marks, since browsers are supposed to add language-specific quotation marks, provided that the language is indicated in markup, e.g. with <html lang=de>
. However, IE 7 and older do not support q
. And you don’t really gain anything by using q
, as opposite to having quotation marks in the content.
You should check the quotation mark practices from reliable sources. (See e.g. Chicago Manual of Style, which describes the practices of several languages, or check the CLDR Charts.) It depends on the authoring environment how you implement them – using the characters themselves is usually best, but if you find this inconvenient, you can use entity references.
Specifically for German, there are two practices: using U+201E DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK and U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK, „this way“, and using U+00BB RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK and U+00AB LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK, »this way«. Using q
, browsers use the former; the latter could be requested for using the quotes
property in CSS.
If you decide to use the q
element, note that it is the language of the enclosing element (language of the surrounding text), not the language of the q
element (language of the quoted text), that dictates the choice of quotation marks. For example, quoted text in German should have English quotation marks around it, if it appears in an English-language document.