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

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

On Sun, 2006-12-31 at 20:20 -0500, Matthew Raymond wrote:
>    Idle thought:
> 
> | <blockquote>
> |   <p>
> |     <q>rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb</q>
> |     [<cite><a href="www.example.com">Nemo, Works, IV</a></cite>]
> |   </p>
> | </blockquote>
> 
>    The <blockquote> becomes a container that associates <q> elements
> with the first child <cite> element.

It's not a bad thought, even though IMHO it rides roughshot over the
defined semantics of HTML4's blockquote, which I would insist in the
face of the utterly bizarre example at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#text-quotes

The key problem with your suggestion is that you might well want to
quote material which already includes citations. They'd be no way to
distinguish the citation for a q from citations in the quoted material.

Rather than redefining blockquote and q to associate with a cite child,
it might actually make more sense to redefine cite to associate with
blockquote and q children, allowing something like:

<cite>
	<blockquote>
		<p>The learned scholar WhatsHisName wrote that: 
			<cite><q>The foobar is doubled.</q> 
			(Tractatus on the foobar,section466)</cite>.
			</p>
		</blockquote> 
	<a href="www.example.com">Nemo, Works, IV</a>
	</cite>

It may of course be that the way current UAs parse and render cite would make such markup impossible.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis