XHTML2: <cite> element, <quote> element

Hi,

It has been brought to my attention that XHTML2 is lacking the <cite>
element. Could the working group explain how, in XHTML2, to semantically
mark up the names of a source, such as a film title or author's name,
without this element?

I also noticed that the <quote> element requires that authors explicitly
include quote marks. Could the working group explain the reasoning behind
requiring this redundant markup? It makes quotations very hard to process
automatically (you have to attempt to recognise which characters form part
of the quotation marks and which are just part of the quotation itself),
makes styling quotatins much harder than previously (no longer is it
possible to simply italicise the content of a quote and remove all
quotations marks), and makes copy and pasting content into quotations
require that the content be carefully edited so that the correct depth of
quotation marks is always used.

The only reason I could see for making quotation marks required is that
the HTML4 <q> element was unsuccessful because it required that the author
_omit_ them, which was incompatible with past implementations. However,
this argument does not apply to XHTML2 as the XHTML2 namespace is
different and therefore there are no legacy implementations to speak of.

In other respects, I like the direction that XHTML2 is going in, and would
like to congratulate the working group on their work so far.

-- 
Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
"meow"                                          /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/                         `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 14 January 2003 03:04:57 UTC