Re: cite, title, citation, author

Bertilo Wennergren [bertilow@gmx.net] wrote:

> thus also in XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 1.1). The use of "cite" to delineate
> the speker is however not in accordance with common practice. Normally
> "cite" is used _only for the title_ of a source.

HTML is a lightweight structural markup language.  If you want a more 
heavyweight one, use something like docbook, don't try to turn 
HTML into that.

I suspect cite hasn't had much attention because it is probably, 
at least for any of the purposes discussed here, used for less than 1 
in a 1000 web pages.  However, given that HTML is lightweight, 
and there is nothing else other than cite to cover the use of italics 
in conventional typography to indicate a proper name, I would 
suggest that cite could reasonably be used for any such case of 
highlighting a proper name which couldn't really be considered 
stressing it.  Given that one has a clean slate in XHTML2, maybe 
a different element name should be chosen.