[whatwg] New URL Standard

[Jukka K. Korpela]

2012-09-24 12:47, Karl Dubost wrote:

> On cite attributes, I'm using urn:isbn:
>
> <blockquote cite="urn:isbn:2-7073-1038-7">
>     <p>J'aime la liberté. J'aime être responsable
>        de mes actes. J'aime comprendre ce que je
>        fais… Et, cependant, je donne mon accord
>        à ce marché bizarre.</p>
> </blockquote>
>
> Which I can use and parse with an extension in Opera [1] which convert it
 > into a link to the Open Library. In the future I could give 
accessibilities
> to different services, and the user could choose its own reference system.

This is all very cool in its own way, and could be useful when used
with discipline within a discipline. But for a long time, such cool 
ideas will not be supported in most browsing situations. Yet, authors 
who know the cool idea will apply it and will fail to "duplicate" any 
credits in the normal visible content. This means that to most users, a 
quotation will appear without any credits or source information.

It also means that the only immediately available source information for 
a quotation will be an ISBN in URL format. So, for example, working 
offline, you won't see even the title and the author. Would the 
quotation even satisfy the legal requirements for quotations?

If the credits are additionally given in visible content, there *there* 
is the place to do cool things with ISBNs. The credits, when they 
include the ISBN in addition to author, title, etc., could have the ISBN 
part turned to an element like <a href="urn:isbn:2-7073-1038-7">ISBN 
2-7073-1038-7</a>. (This would still suffer from lack of compatibility 
with older user agents, creating non-working links on them, so maybe 
some new markup - which would simply be ignored by old user agents - 
would be better.)

The point, however, is that the cite attribute in <blockquote> is broken 
by design and should not be implemented in any new ways (or old).

Yucca