Re: Proposal for the deprecation of <blockquote>

Yes, I don't think addressing a minor bug so that two well-supported
elements (<footer> and <cite>) can be used together in a suitable context
could really be considered "a waste of everyone's time".

Certainly not more time intensive than Hixie's idea of introducing an
entirely new element in the form of <credit(s)> to the fray (
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2012-February/034822.html
)





On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Steve Faulkner
<faulkner.steve@gmail.com>wrote:

> 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/
>>
>>
>