- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jukka.k.korpela@kolumbus.fi>
- Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2014 20:07:42 +0300
- To: public-html@w3.org
2014-06-07 15:47, Steve Faulkner wrote: > I made a minor edit to the definition of the cite element [1] and > added an example [2] to make it clearer that <cite> can be used on > abbreviated forms of citation references such as "Ibid." > Tweaking the definition of <cite> gets complicated, since people have so different opinions of what constitutes a citation and different ideas of why they would be using <cite>. I don’t remember having seen any analysis of the actual benefits that might be achieved. But there will be some confusion. Historically, and in current reality, <cite> is one way of italicizing text, and some people (including me) have used it on “semantic” grounds when the content is a title of a work. Now, if it means a citation, rather broadly speaking, it is not that meaningful to have it italicized by default. Yet, the rendering section says that browsers are expected to apply cite { font-style: italic }. Of course, authors can (with the usual CSS caveats) switch off italic with CSS. But should an element have some default rendering that is not suitable for most situations where the element could be used, according to its definition? Incidentally, “Ibid.” is sometimes italicized, but not because it is a citation (of a kind); rather, because it is foreign language. It is better to think of an equivalent expression in the language of the document, like “the same work”, in order to see that default italic is not appropriate. If <cite> is meant to be purely structural (or, if you insist, “semantic”) markup for a citation, then it would be logical to drop the default italic. This in turn would change the rendering of existing pages for no good reason. The really logical conclusion would be to make <cite> deprecated markup, due to ambiguous definitions in old HTML specifications and varying usage. If markup for citations is deemed sufficiently useful, for reasons that hopefully someone could explain, it would best be designed from scratch and with no default rendering rules. -- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Saturday, 7 June 2014 17:08:06 UTC