I wrote:
That's not a fair summary: see the example I gave to Anne van Kesteren
of getting back to a Hamlet scene text from citeHamlet, I.ii/cite
with a mere Google query.
James Graham wrote:
Using the cite attribute to link to a search page is at best almost-useless
and at worst damaging and confusing.
Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. The cite in my example does /not/
link anywhere. My point was that even with the mere knowledge that the
contents of cite are a citation, agents can construct useful web
queries. Not as good as a cite with a URI, but not /useless/.
It would be more accurate to see cite could
be improved upon. IMHO it would be nicer to have real elements in HTML
for detailed bibliographic elements, but that goes against the general
consensus that we should shift detailed semantics into
microformats/roles.
So, if we accept that full bibliographic data will only be accepted as a
microformat, does cite have enough value to warrant keeping it? If the best
use case we can manage is it could link to a search for the source I would
say
the element is worthless.
My point was it could be used as the basis for a search by an automated
agent. This would be true of a microformat like hcite too, /if/ there
any guarantee that Web Applications 1.0 compatible user agents would
support such a microformat. (Of course, if there were such a guarantee,
one would have to ask why the microformat in question wasn't part of the
spec in the first place.) Guaranteed recognition of the cite element
is better than nothing.
I suspect that browser makers would be unwilling to implement this change
since
there are probably a fair few sites that depend on cite being italic to
look
as the author intended and, as far as I know, major browsers have essentially
interoperable default style sheets so making this change would break sites
compared to the competition.
From the perspective of website visitors, I'm not such a change would be
remarkable. For example, in some bibliographic styles, book titles for
example are non-italic anyway. From the perspective of authors, a fix
preserving the faulty semantics is trivial (style cite italic) and a
revision of their site to use the correct semantics is desirable.
I asked:
Deprecating cite wouldn't solve any problems, as far as I can see. How
would you connect q or blockquote to a particular hCite block?
James Graham replied:
Indeed in many cases where citations are important there is no
direct quote to match the citation (almost all scientific papers fit this
model).
This might well be an argument for providing ways to explicitly connect
cite with elements other than q or blockquote (a global attribute
citeref could perhaps do that rather well). Given the existence of the
humanities (a literary form in which extended series of quotations are
decorated with footnotes and occasional commentary), I can't see how
it's in any way an argument against providing ways to explicitly connect
cite with q and blockquote.
James Graham continued:
But, accepting that some people think this is very important, I don't
see how a cite element that is not part of the microformat helps here -
unless
sandwiching stuff in cite without the microformat filling can itself lead
to
the development of worthwhile UA features.
Well, the original idea was the cite could contain some sort of link,
and that this would be a way of associating a URI with a q or
blockquote. To this I made an additional point, that the mere act of
marking up a bit of content as a citation with cite makes it easier to
perform more sophisticated automated processing, such as retrieving a
best guess source.
How worthwhile such automated processing is depends partly on whether
the spec and tools make it easy to provide citations in URI form.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
