[whatwg] the cite element

Kristof Zelechovski giecrilj at stegny.2a.pl
Sat Jun 6 02:10:28 PDT 2009


Instead of:
	<li><q>Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps.</q><br />  --
<cite>William Hazlitt</cite></li>
Consider:
	<li><q>Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps.</q><br />
(William Hazlitt)</li>
Reads equally good, if not better.
Bibliographic references are a topic of its own, and it is not going to be
solved with the CITE element alone.  Bibliography is a form of a database
while hTml is mostly about text.  The best HTML approximation to a list of
bibliographical references is a table, except that tables tend to be
unreadable when they are too wide.  You could also use 
<A HREF="urn:ISBN:." ><CITE >A brief history of time</CITE ></A >
and let the UA figure out the details.
Removing the default style from CITE is too fragile: using the style
attribute makes the code messy and using a class will not survive
copy-paste.
Chris




More information about the whatwg mailing list