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

[James Graham]

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
> Henri Sivonen wrote:

>>  And I am unconvinced that authors would be willing to spoon feed data mining  
>> tools, considering that the beneficiaries of such spoon feeding are  
>> not the authors themselves nor even their direct human audience.
> 
> So you want to quote a book. Do you choose to:
> 
> a) Spend a minute gathering the relevant information and arranging it
> into a marked up and styled citation?
> 
> b) Spend three seconds typing an ISBN into a box and get the same
> result?
> 
> I choose b).

FWIW, I know, offhand, the ISBN of exactly zero books (whereas I could 
probably quote from several). Therefore it would take considerable 
effort for me to find the ISBN of a book I was quoting (I would have to 
spend time looking it up on the book or online somewhere), then more 
effort to carefully copy the human unfriendly string into whatever tool 
was demanding this apparently superfluous information. I would imagine 
that "three seconds" is an underestimate of about an order of magnitude.

This last bit is the killer; people hate doing mundane things even when 
they have to (I've never met anyone who enjoys filling in BibTeX 
citations, for example and that is of comparable difficulty to the 
process you advocate), and certainly won't do if if they see no benefit 
for their efforts (even if some minority group will).

-- 
"The universe doesn't care what you believe. The wonderful thing about 
science is that it doesn't ask for your faith, it just asks for your 
eyes" --- http://xkcd.com/c154.html