RE: proper use of <u> and <i> elements

I think you've found the right approach, Rob: use <cite> with
appropriate CSS. This would also make it possible to use CSS to support
the presentation requirements of different citation formats   (for
example, APA, MLA, etc., etc.).

 

John

 

Or maybe not.  Here is an example.  Let's suppose you are given this
document
(http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/humanities/pdf/Hacker-Daly-MLA.pdf)
to convert into an HTML page, and you want to format the document to
match the original MLA style when printed, including Works Cited.
Wouldn't the most proper way to do this be as follows (assuming you did
the styles externally)?

 

<div style="margin-left:1em;"><cite style="text-indent:-1em;
font-style:normal; display:block;">

Haughney, Christine. "Taking Phones out of Drivers' Hands."

<u style="text-decoration:underline;">Washington Post</u> 5 Nov. 2000:
A8.</cite></div>

 

Of course, the document wouldn't validate to XHTML 1.1 because of the
deprecated <u>, but by extending the DTD you could make it work, right?
Anybody know of a good tutorial that would explain how to do something
like that?  It would start something like this:

 

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"

[

<!ELEMENT u ANY>

<!ATTLIST u style CDATA #IMPLIED>

<!ATTLIST u class CDATA #IMPLIED>

]

>

 

but I don't know the most efficient way to specify that <u> is a child
element of <cite> and not wipe out all the other child elements
associated with <cite>.  I've been poring over the XHTML DTD 1.1 but it
is very complex, and I'm afraid I'm out of my depth.

 

Rob

Received on Thursday, 5 August 2004 16:17:16 UTC