[whatwg] Proposal of an <author> element

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

Nils Dagsson Moskopp wrote:
> Quotations in the context of an article usually consist of three
> elements:
> 
>       * the actual quote
>       * the author of the quote
>       * the citation source
> 
> For two of these parts, there is markup; however, for the author, there
> is none. I have no reason to believe that the author is of significantly
> less importance than the citation source, and also no reason to assert
> that the author is frequently omitted.
> 
> Not really citations (as in for use with the <blockquote> or <q>
> element) may be multimedia elements that may or may never have appeared
> in any other document: When marking them up, it may be desired to
> specify an author but impossible to specify a work.
> 
> Also, there are cases, when the <cite> element isn't applicable,
> especially when quoting speech that isn't part of a work (like J. Random
> Politicians mutterings).
> 
> Therefore, I am proposing to add an <author> element to the spec.

It's not clear what end-user problem you're trying to solve; you'll need 
to define that first. See the FAQ on feature proposals:

http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_there_a_process_for_adding_new_features_to_the_spec.3F

Beyond that: one potential use for markup of this sort would be to pull 
out sources and quotations. This might be for text analysis (e.g. show 
me all the known quotations in a particular medieval text) or it might 
be so that you can search to see what people are quoted to have said 
about something, or what a particular person is quoted to have said. For 
example:

http://www.daylife.com/search/quotes/all/1?q=Daylife

(It would be interesting to know whether Daylife would find such markup 
useful or not.)

 From the perspective of that use-case, your markup has the deficiency 
of not specifying any association between an AUTHOR element and one or 
more Q or BLOCKQUOTE elements.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis