[whatwg] <blockquote cite> and <q cite>

[Sander Tekelenburg]

At 13:22 +0100 UTC, on 2006-12-31, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

[...]

I'm assuming you're referring to "If a blockquote element is preceeded or
followed by a p element that contains a single cite element and is itself not
preceeded or followed by another blockquote element and does not itself have
a q element descendant, then, the citation given by that cite element gives
the source of the quotation contained in the blockquote element.", at
<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-blockquote>.

> So we can drop the unsupported cite="" attribute from both <blockquote>
> and <q> or at least provide a way to have visual metadata.

I can't follow this. It's not clear to me what you mean with "unsupported"
("not implemented in a useful way by popular browsers" perhaps?), nor do I
see how <cite a=URI> provides a way to have visual metadata that <q cite=URI>
does not already. (Not to mention that <q cite=URI> allows authors to provide
markup that can be understood by older UAs.)

> (I'm aware
> cite="" is exposed in some way in some user agents, but that's not really
> usable in any way...)

{frown} Why is that not usable in any way?

If your argument is that you'd like to see better support in UAs, I think I
agree with another poster's suggestion of making the spec be more clear (to
UA authors) about how to implement this. Some UA authors are represented in
WHATWG, so I'd think it should be rather easy to find out what they find
unclear about the current spec.

FWIW, I find iCab's implementation quite usable: indicating that metadata is
available by a cursor change when hovering over the data, and allowing to
directly open the cite attribute's URI (in a new window) through the
contextual menu's "Show Reference" command. (I'm not fond of
'hover-dependancy' like this, but through CSS a more easily recognisable clue
can be added. For instance something like the dotted underline that has
become somewhat common, to indicate title attributes for abbr and acronym.)


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>