Re: Proposal for the deprecation of <blockquote>

Hi henri,

AT such as JAWS Announces when the virtual cursor enters or exits a
blockquote element. Navigate by and list instances of blockquote element in
document.

And JAWS also recognises and announces <footer>

so for the example code:

<blockquote>
  <p>The blockquote element represents a section that is quoted from
another source.</p>
    <footer>— <cite><a href="
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/grouping-content.html#the-blockquote-element">W3C
HTML5 specification</a></cite></footer>
</blockquote>

The use of the footer element is an improvement to user experience as it
identifies the citation as content information.


--

Regards

SteveF
HTML 5.1 <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/>


On 19 August 2013 11:38, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@hsivonen.fi> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Heydon Pickering
> <heydon@heydonworks.com> wrote:
> >> Perhaps you could explain, in this case, why so many discussions have
> >> taken
> >> place on the subject for such a long time
> >
> >>Because the thinking of the semantics for the sake of semantics (as in
> >>more semantics the better, since semantics are good) as opposed to
> >>thinking of semantics as a way of getting someone else's receiving
> >>software to exhibit some commonly useful behavior is a common trap for
> >>people to fall into.
> >
> > Fortunately, I do not personally struggle with the concept of semantics
> re
> > their consumption by software.
> >
> > Blockquote's lack of a clear metadata solution is an obvious anomaly
> > (discussed at great length here:
> http://html5doctor.com/blockquote-q-cite/
> > and
> >
> http://www.projectevolution.com/activity/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-blockquote/
> > and
> > http://oli.jp/2011/blockquote/) and is deserving of a clearer, simpler
> > solution that makes
> > easier work of writing and consuming blockquotes for all (human and
> nonhuman
> > alike).
>
> Based on quick skimming, all those three articles are exemplars of
> falling into the trap that I was referring to above. They start from
> the observation that attribution for a quotation is an identifiable
> piece of text and then jump to the assumption that there should be
> explicit markup for identifying attributions for quotations.
>
> None of them approached the problem from consumption use case side.
> None of them appear say stuff like: "If the attributions for
> quotations were explicitly marked up, it would enable us to develop a
> user-facing browser feature X that would be so useful that the
> usefulness would justify the cost of the implementation, the
> standardization and the evangelization of getting a web offers to use
> the markup. Furthermore, feature X would be useful to have even if the
> bulk of existing quotations don't use standardized attribution
> markup."
>
> Semantics that don't enable useful user-facing features on the
> consumption side are waste of everyone's time. Even if the attribution
> for quotation could be, in principle, explicitly identified, if
> there's no strong consumption side use case for having it explicitly
> identified, it doesn't need markup (especially not standardized
> markup).
>
> --
> Henri Sivonen
> hsivonen@hsivonen.fi
> http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
>
>