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

[Henri Sivonen]

On Jan 4, 2007, at 00:50, Karl Dubost wrote:

> Le 4 janv. 2007 à 01:41, Henri Sivonen a écrit :
>> If HTML had unambiguous sourcing of quotations, what cool software  
>> would you write that would consume the markup?
>
> Given into account that the notion of "cool" is very subjective and  
> tied to one's interests.
>
> * http://web.archive.org/web/20030211001151/http://diveintomark.org/ 
> archives/quotations/
> http://web.archive.org/web/20030207035922/diveintomark.org/archives/ 
> citations/
> http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/01/28/autocontent

That's an oft-cited example, but
  1) It doesn't demonstrate a need for a Web-wide distributed system  
for quotation or citation cataloging.
  2) The flagship example of mining the semantics of quotations and  
citations was dumping the data as lists! Is extracting lists of stuff  
the best that can be done? No offense to Mark intended, but just  
making lists isn't impressive enough to justify the trouble, in my  
opinion.
  3) The originator of the example has discontinued the example.

> * technorati, bloglines like
> http://www.bookorati.com/

The crucial difference is that Technorati and Bloglines work without  
a per-post effort to support them.

The exception is Technorati Tags, but in that case, the blogger is  
likely seeking to get attention for his/her own stuff instead of  
wanting to make an effort to help Technorati's business.

> * threading for commenting system on Weblogs

Commenting systems are controlled by blog engines, so blog engine can  
present threading in an internally consistent way without there being  
a need for Web-wide comment threading markup.

Or did you mean distributed threading so that Technorati and Google  
could construct a Usenet-like view of the blogosphere?

> a database of well known quotations, authors.

That's a "nice to have" thing that could be made if the data was  
there for another reason. It is not a killer app that justifies the  
effort of providing the data in the first place.

> a databse of poetry

I don't understand why quotation and citation markup would help there.

> frequency analysis of quotes for texts.

You could only measure the frequency of particular markup elements.  
You wouldn’t be really measuring the frequency of quotations, because  
authors cannot be trusted to use semantic markup.

> I can also imagine a tool which displays possibility to have more  
> information on the quotes contained in the page by displaying a  
> widget with more exploration:
> spontaneous buy of the source which has been cited (without to  
> necessary use amazon), or get more information about an author,  
> redirecting to wikipedia
> ala PageMapper http://labs.metacarta.com/PageMapper/
> or OpenLayers http://openlayers.org/

MS SmartTags weren't well received by Web authors. Some authors also  
didn't like a Google offering that autolinkified ISBNs (which, BTW,  
didn't require ISBNs to be marked up as ISBNs). You seem to be  
suggesting author-blessed SmartTags without explaining why authors  
would want to write for an indirection system instead of making  
straight normal links themselves.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/