Re: Proposal for the deprecation of <blockquote>

Heydon Pickering, Thu, 15 Aug 2013 12:30:57 +0100:
> The beauty of the <figure> and <figcaption> element pairing is the
> simplicity of the relationship:
> 
> <figure>: thing
> <figcaption>: information about thing

So why not simply wrap a <figure> around the <blockquote>, like so:

  <figure>
    <blockquote>
      quote
    </blockquote>
    <figcaption> Information about quote</figcaption>
  </figure>

In fact, Steve’s bug[1] points to a page by Oli[2], which is part of 
Oli’s argumentation for the use of <footer>, but in which Oli 
nevertheless is quoting quotations using <figure>, and where he adds 
metadata about these quotes, using <figcaption> (the code in this quote 
[sic] is simplified):

<figure>
  <blockquote>“Our pleasant Willy ah is dead of late,” &amp;c
      <footer>Spenser, Tears of the Muses, 1590,</footer>
  </blockquote>
  <figcaption>Right-aligned citation [… from …] Shakespeare manual
              by Frederick Gard Fleay, p19 (in Google Books)
  </figcaption>
</figure>

If Oli had been doing what he is advocating in the other page that 
Steve’s bug is referencing [3], then he should have replaced the above 
<figure> by a <blockuote>, and the <figcaption> by a <footer>:

<blockquote>
  <blockquote>“Our pleasant Willy ah is dead of late,” &amp;c
      <footer>Spenser, Tears of the Muses, 1590,</footer>
  </blockquote>
  <footer>Right-aligned citation [… from …] Shakespeare manual
              by Frederick Gard Fleay, p19 (in Google Books)
  </footer>
</blockquote>

In my view, this is messy. Btw HTML5 is already, in some situations, 
advocating the use of <figure> + <figcaption> rather than <caption> for 
table captioning: “When a table element is the only content in a figure 
element other than the figcaption, the caption element should be 
omitted in favor of the figcaption.” [4]

So, all in all, I agree with Heydaon that <figure> is the way to go. 
However, the HTML5 spec could point out that <figure> may keep a 
<blockquote> in its body.

[1] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=22996

[2] http://oli.jp/example/blockquote-metadata/

[2] http://oli.jp/2011/blockquote/

[4] 
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/tabular-data.html#the-caption-element

-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Saturday, 17 August 2013 21:52:55 UTC