- From: Matthew Thomas <mpt@myrealbox.com>
- Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 23:36:54 +1300
On 15 Nov, 2004, at 12:58 PM, Laurens Holst wrote: > > Matthew Thomas wrote: > ... >> You mean posts by citation >> <http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/12/27/pushing_the_envelope>. I >> hope "Hixie said I was using [<cite>] correctly" >> <http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/01/19/influences> was an >> over-broad interpretation of Ian's words, because (a) Ian has >> mentioned "'clarifying' the definition of <cite>" >> <http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2004-November/ >> 002329.html>, and (b) while Mark's uses of <cite> matched the example >> given in the HTML 4.01 spec >> <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/text.html#edef-CITE>, they >> did not match the default presentation in all visual UAs, nor the >> resultant use by most Web authors. >> (Specifically, I think the most coherent and backward-compatible >> "clarification" would be to restrict <cite> to titles of works, >> because inviting authors to use it for names of people as suggested >> in the HTML 4.01 example would require authors to override <cite>'s >> italic-ness frequently, making them more likely to abandon the >> element completely.) > > Actually, in the cases where I used cite for that purpose, italics > what exactly what I intended them to be rendered like. > > Example: > "<p>On a side note, it seems that <cite>fantasai</cite> is getting > really busy with the alternate style sheet switcher (at least I?m > seeing a fair lot of activity on the bugs involved), so hopefully by > the time Firefox 1.0 gets released it will be back in. And perhaps we > will even see persistent style switching, though I wouldn?t count on > it.</p>" > ... If you really want italics there, with all due respect, you're strange. Occasionally gossip columns have the equivalent of .name {font-weight: bold;}, but otherwise the vast majority of publishers don't give people's names in-line any special styling at all. Even <http://diveintomark.org/css/squares-summer.css> has "cite {font-style: normal;}" to reverse UAs' default italic, but people won't be bothered adding that to their site's style sheets if it's easier just to not use <cite> in the first place. So if <cite> is "clarified" to include names of authors, we'll see the first two phenomena I described a week ago <http://listserver.dreamhost.com/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2004- November/002344.html>: most people won't bother using it (because it doesn't give them a presentation they want), and those people who do use it will do so overzealously. You just provided an excellent example of overzealous use: you wrote "<cite>fantasai</cite>", but that is not conformant, because you used fantasai neither as "a citation" nor as "a reference to another source". -- Matthew Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
Received on Wednesday, 17 November 2004 02:36:54 UTC