[whatwg] The blockquote element spec vs common quoting practices

Bjartur Thorlacius svartman95 at gmail.com
Fri Jul 8 04:52:03 PDT 2011


Þann fös  8.júl 2011 11:20, skrifaði Jeremy Keith:
> 3) The solution that Oli has proposed (allowing footer within
> blockquote to include non-quoted information) is an elegant one, in
> my opinion. I can think of some solutions that would involve putting
> the attribution data outside the blockquote and then explicitly
> associating it using something like the @for attribute and an ID, but
> that feels messier and less intuitive to me. Simply allowing a footer
> within a blockquote to contain non-quoted material satisfies the
> design principle "Avoid needless complexity."
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#avoid-needless-complexity
>
>  "Simple solutions are preferred to complex ones, when possible.
> Simpler features are easier for user agents to implement, more likely
> to be interoperable, and easier for authors to understand."
Citation will most likely contain the cited resource (@cite), the title
of the cited resource (@title) and the date and optionally time of the
quote (@datetime?). Further information could be put into other 
attributes as necessary. This seems simpler than cluttering the quote
and citation together in the <blockquote>, but just throwing everything 
inside of the <blockquote> may very well be easier to implement. But is 
it really possible to mark such citations up without presentational 
elements?

<!--	2112952019 = my national ID -->
<blockquote cite="kennitala:2112952019" title="Bjartur Thorlacius">
<p>Look ma, no <footer>!</p>
<p>I think we should keep citations outside of <blockquote>'s 
contents as citations aren't part of the quote per se, but metadata on 
the quote and the quoted resource</p>
</blockquote>


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