Following-up on my conversion to HTML 5 it looks like “ will not be considered valid in HTML 5. I missed an email, which is easy to do, back in Feburary 2008 from Ian Hickson about the IE Image Toolbar hack. Henri Sivonen raised this issue, probably because he gets gruff from authors who use his validator:
In short, some authors want to use “ but (X)HTML5 doesn’t allow it.
Personally, I think that authors who want to disable User Agent features like that are misguided.
Ian Hickson responded:
Proprietary extensions to HTML are just that, proprietary extensions, and are therefore by intentionally not conforming.
And you know what? I agree and I’ve removed it. If Internet Explorer wants to implement a usability flaw then who am I to disable it. If IE users don’t like the image toolbar they should complain to MSFT or switch to Firefox or Opera.