2012-02-12 2:13, Ian Hickson wrote:
That's not to say that one day we won't provide an explicit way to mark up attribution for <blockquote>s in markup, just that the desired presentation isn't a relevant concern in doing so
The relationship between a quotation and the indication of source is not presentational, and more than being a quotation is presentational. Stylistic variations in displaying a quotation or the relationship are presentational.
The <blockquote> has been, and will be, rather pointless without markup for “credits” (indication of author and source, which are normally required by law). It has been, and will be, either ignored by authors or used to mean “indent” in a comfortable way, though accidentally indentation may be used for quotations.
Even formally, a <blockquote> element has been, and remains to be, at most semi-semantic. The definition “block quotation” left it open what distinguishes it from other quotations, except in rendering. “A section quoted from another source” surely looks like more semantic and structural, but if taken seriously, it would kill <blockquote>.
Seldom does an author wish to quote an entire section. It is not even legal to quote more than is required to fulfill the acceptable purpose of quoting. I don’t think I have ever quoted anything that could sensibly be called a section. None of the examples currently presented at http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/grouping-content.html#the-blockquote-element comes even close
Wrapping <blockquote> inside <figure> just to be able to present “credits” as <figcaption> is highly artificial. It is also clumsy, especially considering that it would have to be the *normal* way of presenting a block quotation to satisfy legal requirements.
If we start from the semantic and logical concept of a quotation, then it should be obvious that the element should have a subelement for providing source information (“credits”), normally at the end of the element. The reason why this has not been so from the beginning is that <blockquote> was really designed for indentation, though it was _named_ after one use for indentation that the designers had in their mind. And that’s how it has been used.
Since in current usage, <blockquote> means just “indent” more often than not, browsers and search engines should not and will not imply any specific semantics for it. Thus it will be pointless to use it.
So leave <blockquote> as legacy markup and recommend it to be used, in new documents, only for indentation in rare situations where an author much prefers indentation even in the absence of CSS.
And design markup for quotations so that suits practical needs and legal requirements. For this, introduce <quotation> with <src> as a subelement
Yucca
