Re: Use of <cite> with abbreviated citation forms - clarified

Hi Jukka, comments inline

--

Regards

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


On 7 June 2014 18:07, Jukka K. Korpela <jukka.k.korpela@kolumbus.fi> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
The substantive changes to the cite element happened 6 months or so back.
This minor change attempts to make it clearer on one aspect. no normative
changes were made.


> 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 }.
>
> The changes made to cite previously were based on discussion and usage
data.



> 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?
>

in fact the cite element is being used literally billions of times daily in
conformance with the current definition and with the default styling
removed. have a look at google or bing search results (for example)




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