[whatwg] the cite element

Erik Vorhes erik at textivism.com
Wed Jul 1 10:04:05 PDT 2009


On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Kristof
Zelechovski<giecrilj at stegny.2a.pl> wrote:
> I can imagine two reasons the CITE element cannot be defined as "citing
> whom":
>  1. Existing tools may assume it contains a title.

Existing tools (which I would assume follow the HTML 4.01 spec) would
be mistaken in their implementation of the <cite> element, then:
"CITE: Contains a citation or reference to other sources." (See
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#h-9.2.1>.) Moreover, in
its sample usage, the HTML 4.01 spec uses <cite> for more than titles.

While the HTML 4.01 specification is hardly perfect, I don't see the
value in limiting the semantic potential of the <cite> element in
HTML5.

Erik Vorhes



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