[whatwg] the cite element

[Smylers]

Erik Vorhes writes:

> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 4:59 AM, Smylers<Smylers at stripey.com> wrote:
> 
> > For words that you wish to have no distinct presentation from the
> > surrounding text -- words that readers don't need calling out to
> > them as being in any way 'special' -- simply don't mark them up.
> 
> Interesting point. Should the HTML5 specification explicitly admonish
> against using microformats, microdata, RDFa, and the like?

Possibly I stated the above too strongly.

In general invisible metadata doesn't have a great history; the most
successful systems involving machine-parsed web pages seem to involve
machines parsing the human visible parts of pages rather than things
like <meta keywords>.

But I didn't actually mean to go so far as to say these should never be
used.  If somebody can do something useful with names marked up as
metadata then that's a reason for marking it up in some way.  But HTML 5
doesn't need a specific element for that; there's the generic microdata
syntax.

If marking up people's names when citing them becomes really common then
a future version of the spec could mint an element for that (like
happened with <time>, a common metadata pattern).

But there still wouldn't be a call for an element which sometimes
indicates its contents should be displayed to the reader in a way which
indicates they are the title of a work and sometimes indicates its a
person's name.

Smylers