Re: Proposal for the deprecation of <blockquote>

Okay, Bruce.

I'm with you on the re(re)definition of <cite> to include authors / people,
for starters. I think that should happen anyway.

I'm also up for clear guidelines stating that <cite> should be a descendant
of <blockquote> and/or <figure>.
That's the clearest and simplest way to associate a citation with its
subject/object.

My remaining concern is that the single <cite> is too restrictive. What if,
as Karl suggests in his example, we want to
attribute the source _and_ the author?

Sure, we can chuck in two <cite>s or a <cite> and an <a> with an author
link relation, but how do we make sure that
parsers can demarcate these portions of the <blockquote> (or <figure>) and
not consider them (as a class of meta-information)
part of the quotation itself? Putting them in a <p> doesn't cut it.

This is why I like <figcaption>. At its most basic level, it says "this is
information about the information".

The reason I suggest <figure> over <blockquote> is by the simple expedient
that <blockquote> doesn't have an equivalent of
<figcaption>; it doesn't have an element for saying "a bunch of information
- author, source, description, whatever - about the
thing".

Ultimately, <figcaption> is clumsily named. We should be using <caption>,
as we do with tables, for both <blockquote>s and
<figure>s. In fact...

"When a table element is the only content in a figure element other than
the figcaption, the caption element should be
omitted in favor of the figcaption." (
http://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Elements/caption)

It occurs to me that redefining the <caption> and <cite> elements to have
broader remits would solve a lot of these problems.

Example:

<blockquote | figure>
   <p>I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm</p>
   <caption>Sung by <cite>Iggy Pop</cite> on the album <cite>Raw
Power</cite></caption>
</blockquote | figure>

Further thoughts?