ʔ̦

Question

I d like to start using question marks at the end of clauses as well as sentences. To indicate this I would like to use a question mark with a comma underneath, which I d like to call a quomma.

There doesn t seem to be a Unicode code point for this unconventional punctuation, so what is the most Web-friendly way of doing this?

The combining diacritical mark doesn t seem to work anywhere I ve tried it: ?̦ (Though is there something which prevents overlappingʔ̦ because the glottal stop mark, which looks almost like a dotless question mark (ʔ) does seem to work, as you just saw!)
SVG support is not widespread, and this would require a per-font SVG anyway.
A raster image seems a bit of a crap solution.
Is there some cheeky but not-too-hacky HTML/CSS?
Any other ideas?

Answer 1

Have a look at the combining diatrics (charts), in particular U+0326 (COMBINING COMMA BELOW).

The HTML ʔ̦ produces:

ʔ̦

Since this is unlikely to be a grapheme used in any existing language, whether that works or not on your browser may depend on a number of factors related to Unicode and font support.

Answer 2

This one works inline; even IE can handle inline-block displays on span-elements:

<p>Some text with a quomma in it <span class="quomma">?<span class="c">,</span></span> and some more text</p>

CSS:

span.quomma {
    display: inline-block;
    position: relative;
}

span.quomma .c {
    display: block;
    position: absolute;
    left: .1em;
    top: 0;
}

Answer 3

Perhaps not a satisfactory answer, but you don t need a special symbol for this. Simply use a question mark and continue the sentence as if it were a comma:

Would you prefer some of a? is b more to your taste? or how about c?

Like, I was at the mall? and I saw this guy? and he smiled at me? and I was like OMG!
– Mike Daniels

I m not sure of the history or whether it was ever mainstream, but I have seen it, on occasion, used clearly. I doubt any style manual endorses it whole-heartedly—or even at all?—but since you re up for generating your own punctuation, that doesn t seem a huge concern. At one time, wasn t it common to indicate sentence breaks specially? or not? Wouldn t such indication obviate the quomma? or is there still a need for it? (Can I keep that up any longer? Nope.)

ʔ̦

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