Re: Use of <cite> with abbreviated citation forms - clarified

2014-06-07 15:47, Steve Faulkner wrote:
> I made a minor edit to the definition of the cite element [1] and 
> added an example [2] to make it clearer that <cite> can be used on 
> abbreviated forms of citation references such as "Ibid."
>
Tweaking the definition of <cite> gets complicated, since people have so 
different opinions of what constitutes a citation and different ideas of 
why they would be using <cite>. I don’t remember having seen any 
analysis of the actual benefits that might be achieved.

But there will be some confusion. Historically, and in current reality, 
<cite> is one way of italicizing text, and some people (including me) 
have used it on “semantic” grounds when the content is a title of a 
work. Now, if it means a citation, rather broadly speaking, it is not 
that meaningful to have it italicized by default. Yet, the rendering 
section says that browsers are expected to apply cite { font-style: 
italic }.

Of course, authors can (with the usual CSS caveats) switch off italic 
with CSS. But should an element have some default rendering that is not 
suitable for most situations where the element could be used, according 
to its definition?

Incidentally, “Ibid.” is sometimes italicized, but not because it is a 
citation (of a kind); rather, because it is foreign language. It is 
better to think of an equivalent expression in the language of the 
document, like “the same work”, in order to see that default italic is 
not appropriate.

If <cite> is meant to be purely structural (or, if you insist, 
“semantic”) markup for a citation, then it would be logical to drop the 
default italic. This in turn would change the rendering of existing 
pages for no good reason.

The really logical conclusion would be to make <cite> deprecated markup, 
due to ambiguous definitions in old HTML specifications and varying 
usage. If markup for citations is deemed sufficiently useful, for 
reasons that hopefully someone could explain, it would best be designed 
from scratch and with no default rendering rules.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Saturday, 7 June 2014 17:08:06 UTC