[html5] Author of a quote - how to mark up?

[Mirko Gustony]

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 12:32 AM, Ian Hickson<ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> In practice, when there is a need for something like this, people tend to
> work around the lack of the feature (e.g. using Microformats). But in
> practice, nobody seems to have realy done so for this case, which
> suggests that it isn't that important in practice.

I tried to do it (the way I described it in my initial mail). My
intention was to give search engines and other programs a hint on the
meaning of the text (to declare who is the author of this quote).

Anyway, I just wanted to know if there is a way in HTML5—which doesn't
seem to be the case.

>
> You're not, but nobody has yet said _why_ they want this. :-)
>

Well, there is a cite element type which should be used to declare the
source of the quotation. Why shouldn't there be an element type or any
other way to mark up a author or originato (as Samer Ziadeh
suggested)?

The way I understood it HTML's element types should be used to mark up
meaning rather than physical appearance. So it would be quite obvious
that one would need a set of tools to mark up meanings that run a bit
deeper than “this is a headline”, “this is important” or “this links
to that ressource”. Today HTML provides some tools to do so (like cite
or dfn) but I'm afraid that a lot is missing.

The question that comes to my mind is: Should HTML provide a more
complete tool set or is this outside of HTML's scope and should be
solved by other technology (Microformats, RDFa, whatever, you name
it)? The former would require a larger vocabulary for HTML with higher
efforts for implementor's of user agents. On the other hand it would
be straight forward to mark up meaning with the tool set HTML provides
since it's still hypertext.

I think there are enough use cases where people want to mark up
quotations, citations and authors. I just think of people from the
world of academics who want to publish their papers online in an
appropriate manner—they do quote a lot and I bet they also name the
authors of quotes. Or maybe you want to make further use of wikiquotes
… but if you say this is not enough I'm fine with it and will start to
look for another way to do so.

Regards
Mirko