[whatwg] The blockquote element spec vs common quoting practices

[Nils Dagsson Moskopp]

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela at cs.tut.fi> schrieb am Sun, 17 Jul 2011
17:09:54 +0300:

> 15.07.2011 19:56, Bjartur Thorlacius wrote:
> > […]
> >
> > But browsers need to be told that that number close to the quotation
> > is an ISBN.
> 
> The string “ISBN” is sufficient evidence of that.

Someone would need to standardize “ISBN sniffing behaviour” for UAs
then. Could you make a proposal?

> […]
> 
>  > @cite contains
> > an URI, that an user agent might be able to use in an automated
> > fashion.
> 
> Might be able, but doesn’t. Can you mention one browser that actually 
> does something useful with it? And it isn’t a particularly new
> feature in specifications; browser vendors have had plenty of time to
> implement it.

Are any reasons for not doing anything with that information known?
Probably a more basic issue: Is the cite attribute actually used?

> > <Cite> contains a human-readable name of a work. That'll
> > rarely be machine-readable.
> 
> HTML documents are always machine-readable. (Well, you _might_ just 
> write HTML on a paper with a pen…)

This is a category error. “Machine-readable” in this context does not
mean “digital information”. Fact: A scanned PDF of a printed out table
of expenses (yes, these occur) may not be “machine-readable” in the
sense Bjartur Thorlacius used here. An ATOM feed certainly is.

-- 
Nils Dagsson Moskopp // erlehmann
<http://dieweltistgarnichtso.net>