Re: Correct usage of the q element

Maybe not an answer but my experience and use of the quotations on the 
Web. What I'm doing right now with XHTML 1.0? I'm doing what I can 
because there's no good citation model.


1st possibility Author and Title inside the citation. Advantage. It 
helps to connect the citation, with its author and other informations 
about it.
Pbs: There's no model to define what's an author? what's a title or 
other kind of information.
	My use of class attributes, in french here, are completely personnal.
=========
<blockquote
	xml:lang="fr"
	cite="urn:isbn:2-07-074689-5">
	<p>Puis il créa des îles, des dieux,
	des glaciers, des bêtes violettes, des
	édifices, des pêcheurs en eau douce et
	en mer, des scarabées.</p>
	<p>
		<cite class="titre">Irréalité et miracle, Né pour naître</cite> -
		<cite class="auteur">Pablo Neruda</cite>
	</p>
</blockquote>
=========

2nd possibility. Basically, the same, except I put the author and the 
title outside. Pb, not anymore a way to relate to the previous content.
=========
<blockquote
	xml:lang="fr"
	cite="urn:isbn:2-07-074689-5">
	<p>Puis il créa des îles, des dieux,
	des glaciers, des bêtes violettes, des
	édifices, des pêcheurs en eau douce et
	en mer, des scarabées.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>
	<cite class="titre">Irréalité et miracle, Né pour naître</cite> -
	<cite class="auteur">Pablo Neruda</cite>
</p>
=========

When you have a quotation in a paragraph, it's becoming worse.

=========
<p>
	<cite class="auteur">Pablo Neruda</cite>
	in the book
	<cite class="titre" xml:lang="fr">Né pour naître</cite>
	has written a poem,
	<cite class="titre" xml:lang="fr">Irréalité et miracle</cite>,
	which starts with
	<q xml:lang="fr" cite="urn:isbn:2-07-074689-5">
	Puis il créa des îles, des dieux,
	des glaciers, des bêtes violettes, des
	édifices, des pêcheurs en eau douce et
	en mer, des scarabées.</q>	
</p>
=========

Now imagine that you have in the same paragraph two or more quotations 
of different authors and there's no way to know who has said what.

Why it's important? because you might need for making a bot which 
crawls your website and make a list of your citation to create a 
database, a list of quotations, etc.

One possibility could be to have the "cite" attribute on every element, 
so you can you put an unique URI associated with each element that will 
help a bot to connect the pieces.

Example in XHTML 2.0
=========
<p>
	<cite
		rel="author"
		cite="http://example.org/ref001/">Pablo Neruda</cite>
	in the book
	<cite
		rel="title"
		xml:lang="fr"
		cite="http://example.org/ref001/">Né pour naître</cite>
	has written a poem,
	<cite
		rel="title"
		xml:lang="fr"
		cite="http://example.org/ref001/">Irréalité et miracle</cite>,
	which starts with
	<quote
		rel="quotation"
		xml:lang="fr"
		cite="http://example.org/ref001/">
	Puis il créa des îles, des dieux,
	des glaciers, des bêtes violettes, des
	édifices, des pêcheurs en eau douce et
	en mer, des scarabées.</quote>	
</p>
=========

Quite verbose, but at least this time, I'm able to run a bot which 
compiles the information and know that the 4 of them are associated.
I have added the "rel" attribute to qualify the type of information, 
though there's a big hole in HTML 4.01 specification which doesn't 
explain how to create profiles, therefore which makes them almost 
useless, because there's no way to write an interoperable profiles 
where a user agent can read and grab the information or an authoring 
tool load a profile to have the possible values accessible, without 
mentionning the problem of "lack of namespaces" clash... two persons 
defining different profiles with the same values.
	


-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Thursday, 12 February 2004 21:27:09 UTC