[Bug 15126] <cite> tag should include an intra-article link to a full source citation (such as an MLA or APA citation in scholarly research)

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=15126

--- Comment #1 from Robert Miesen <robert.miesen@gmail.com> 2011-12-09 07:06:49 UTC ---
Sorry about the initial post: I didn't realize that Bugzilla would auto-encode
all of the HTML markup I entered. Below is a cleaned-up version of the initial
post that takes into account this auto-encoding:


According to the current W3C draft of HTML5, the <cite> element
(http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/text-level-semantics.html#the-cite-element)
represents the title of a work. Currently, there is no way to succinctly
specify a link to the full citation of a source in a scholarly citation format,
such as the MLA or APA formats. This shortcoming results in a diminished markup
language where one has to resort to using anchors
(http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/text-level-semantics.html#the-a-element) which,
while succeeds in getting the job done of providing a link to the full
scholarly citation in an article, really should be part of the cite tag because
of the tight semantic coupling of a source citation and a scholarly citation.

For example, the first citation in the Wikipedia article on Mercurial
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurial) could be enhanced by using markup such
as:

<cite fullcitation="cite_note-announced-0">[1]</cite>

as opposed to the current mechanism:

<a href="#cite_note-announced-0"
wotsearchprocessed="true"><span>[</span>1<span>]</span></a>


Furthermore, this modification to the <cite> tag would turn the discovery
algorithm of a article citaiton analysis and visualization program trivial and
much less error prone than the current mechanisms utilized for linking to the
full citation of a source.

Please consider my proposed addition to the HTML5 language and provide
feedback. Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

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Received on Friday, 9 December 2011 07:06:55 UTC