Re: the cite tag

Reading Mark Pilgrim [1] has an immediate benefit for the reader, 
activate the brain engine. Mark, keep going, it's great :)

There are manuals [2] online for online citation where the reference is online.

What about a french article (just for the purpose of another 
interesting attribute):

Philippe Breton, "Le culte d'Internet", Le Monde Diplomatique, 
octobre 2000, page 36
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2000/10/BRETON/14335

citation:
"Le culte de l'Internet est un culte jeune, de jeunes et pour les 
jeunes. Il est conçu comme une sorte de processus de « révolution 
permanente », où ce sont les « jeunes » qui déterminent la direction 
du mouvement."

The usual citation system will be like:

Breton, P. "Le culte d'Internet". Le Monde Diplomatique. octobre 2000: 36.

The mark-up will be closeof that.

<blockquote cite="http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2000/10/BRETON/14335">

<p>
    <cite title="Author">Breton, P.</cite>
    <cite title="Title" lang="fr">
    <q>
    <a href="http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2000/10/BRETON/14335"
       hreflang="fr">
       Le culte d'Internet</a></q></cite>.
    <cite title="Newspaper" lang="fr">Le Monde Diplomatique</cite>.
    <cite title="Date">Octobre 2000</cite>:
    <cite title="Page">36</cite>
   </p>

<p><q lang="fr">
Le culte de l'Internet est un culte jeune, de jeunes et pour les 
jeunes. Il est conçu comme une sorte de processus de « révolution 
permanente », où ce sont les « jeunes » qui déterminent la direction 
du mouvement.
</q></p>

</blockquote>

All of this seems easy, but in some Weblog systems, or editing tools, 
it's very easy to have a menu which will deal with all of that. We do 
not have to bury the editor with tons of code but to give him/her the 
tools that will do it.

I want to come back on some little things:


* lang="fr"

	Gives the language of what you have cited. Very useful in an 
international context. On my personal weblog, which is in french, and 
have number of english citations, I'm using it all the time. Here I 
have supposed to be in an english context.
	Benefits:
	1. If you do a script like the one of Mark Pilgrim, you can 
add feature like: "Give me all the french citations of my weblog".
	2. Automatic translator could implement it to not translate 
part which should not. If you ask now to an automatic translator to 
translate the page from  english to french, it will also try to 
translate the french in french. Stupid.


* hreflang="fr"

	Not well known tag but that I have awakened [3] in the french 
web log community with the power of CSS. The two benefits:

	1. (Now) You can display the language of the link for your 
user. So someone, who doesn't know at all french, will not be forced 
to follow the link and come back because he/she can't understand. 
How? with CSS rules.

	a[hreflang]:after {
	content: " [" attr(hreflang) "] ";
	font-size: 0.9em;}

It will display the language of the resource just after the link 
between square brackets. In our example, it will give:

Breton, P. "Le culte d'Internet [fr]". Le Monde Diplomatique. octobre 2000: 36.

It's very useful for blogroll too or any links you have in your pages.

	2. (Future) Search engines will benefit of it in the future 
and will have a better indexing if they know the language of the 
source before the indexation.

* q
	I'm using the q tag because it has a very useful purpose 
which is to choose the right quotation mark depending on the language 
context. If you do a citation in french, you have to use « blabla », 
in english, "blabla", in spanish, etc. The spaces and the characters 
used are different depending on the nesting language of the citation, 
not the citation itself.
	The problem is that it's not yet well displayed in Mozilla, 
they are fixing it. Mac IE 5 does it right.


PS: Now I have to translate all of that to put on my weblog :p

[1] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/12/27.html#pushing_the_envelope
[2] http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/citex.html
[3] http://www.la-grange.net/2002/09/03.html

-- 
Karl Dubost / W3C - Conformance Manager
           http://www.w3.org/QA/

      --- Be Strict To Be Cool! ---

Received on Tuesday, 31 December 2002 05:23:15 UTC