2012-02-12 8:36, Nils Dagsson Moskopp wrote:
Why do you hate the cite attribute?
I don’t; it’s just useless, and it does not in any way satisfy the
legal, moral, and scholarly requirements for specifying the source.
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.
Elaborate?
“It shall be permissible to make quotations from a work which has
already been lawfully made available to the public, provided that their
making is compatible with fair practice, and their extent does not
exceed that justified by the purpose.”
http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html#P144_26032
And I don't think I have ever had a need for providing credits that
went beyond having a URI in the cite attribute and a corresponding
hyperlink in the surrounding prose.
By the Berne convention, when a work is quoted, “mention shall be made
of the source, and of the name of the author if it appears thereon.”
The cite attribute, in addition to being practically unsupported, does
not mention anything. A reference in the “surrounding prose” is a
completely unstructured way, regarding HTML markup, and not suitable for
most quotations. It is not reader-friendly at all to provide a
bibliographic reference (author and full title at the minimum) inside text.
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.
That would needlessly complicate parsing the contents of a blockquote
element quite a bit.
Is the comfortability of parsing crucial here? If you want semantic
markup, you should be prepared to facing any technical difficulties that
may arise, rather than let the technicalities dictate rules for markup.
why would it not be
“obvious” ro have a “for” attribute for the cite element?
The <cite> element is, in practice, just some authors’ way of writing
<i>, assumed to be more semantic, when the text is a book title, a movie
name, or something similar. It has really nothing to do with quotations.
The work mentioned might be quoted, too, in the context, but that’s
coincidental.
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.
Riveting tale, chap. Can you provide proof?
Actually the burden of proof is on those who think that <blockquote> has
some useful support.
Regarding on what authors actually use <blockquote> for, I’ve seen quite
enough of pages that use nested <blockquote> elements to achieve
different amounts of indentation.
Discussion forums sometimes use <blockquote> for quotations (though
surely not for quotations of sections), but that’s just because the
authors of forum software found that markup suitable, as quotations are
to be indented. Those who use table layout or style sheets often don’t
bother using <blockquote>.
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.
How do you propose to treat legacy content?
The common treatment of <blockquote> has been well documented.
An alternative might lie in using some kind of framework … for
description … of resources! Are you reasonably sure that Dublin Core or
similar vocabularies can not help you with this use case?
No, I am absolutely sure that Dublin Core and friends has nothing to do
with this. (Besides, DC is an old specification which has been casually
used on web pages for many years, and turned out to be write-only
metadata. All the recent efforts on the metadata front have ignored DC.)
Whatever markup might turn out to be useful for metadata that associates
a quoting document, a quotation, and the quoted source, it first needs
some elements to relate to. In order to say, in metadata, something
about the relationship between a quotation and its source, you need to
mark up the quotation and a reference to the source at the very basic
level. Preferably, using something that unambiguously mean “quotation”
and “source of quotation” and not “indent” or “figure caption.”
Yucca
