[whatwg] The blockquote element spec vs common quoting practices

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Sun Feb 12 09:54:23 PST 2012


On Sun, 12 Feb 2012, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> 2012-02-12 2:13, Ian Hickson wrote:
> > 
> > That's not to say that one day we won't provide an explicit way to 
> > mark up attribution for <blockquote>s in markup, just that the desired 
> > presentation isn't a relevant concern in doing so
> 
> The relationship between a quotation and the indication of source is not 
> presentational, and more than being a quotation is presentational.

Agreed.
 

> The <blockquote> has been, and will be, rather pointless without markup 
> for “credits” (indication of author and source, which are normally 
> required by law).

What's the use case, other than presentation?


On Sun, 12 Feb 2012, Smylers wrote:
> Ian Hickson writes:
> > On Thu, 14 Jul 2011, Kevin Marks wrote:
> > 
> > > There is another common pattern, seen in blogging a lot, of putting
> > > the citation at the top eg
> > > As <cite class="vcard"><a href="http://www.gyford.com/phil/"
> > > class="url" rel="acquaintance met colleague"><abbr title="Phil Gyford"
> > > class="fn">Phil</abbr></a></cite> wrote about the <a
> > > href="http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2009/04/28/geocities.php">ugly
> > > and neglected fragments</a> of Geocities:</p>
> > > 
> > > <blockquote>
> > >   <p>GeoCities is an awful, ugly, decrepit mess. And this is why it
> > > will be sorely missed. It’s not only a fine example of the amateur web
> > > vernacular but much of it is an increasingly rare example of a
> > > <em>period</em> web vernacular. GeoCities sites show what normal,
> > > non-designer, people will create if given the tools available around
> > > the turn of the millennium.</p>
> > > </blockquote>
> > 
> > ... the current markup handles it fine already (as you demonstrate 
> > above).
> 
> Using <cite> like that isn't conforming, surely?

You're right, I missed that <cite> was used instead of <span> there. The 
key part was the use of a paragrah giving attribution just before a 
blockquote being sufficient for practical purposes in blog comment cases 
such as the one Kevin was describing.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'


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