Since Mark Pilgrim began making fine use of cite, I’ve wondering whether my use of said tag has been correct. Mark uses cite to mark up a reference to another source – exactly as I have done with his name in the previous sentence. Conversely, I have always used cite to indicate a quotation from a source (but then I never reckoned on using it to create an archive by citation). Well, it seems we are both right. From the HTML 4.01 spec:
- CITE:
- Contains a citation or a reference to other sources.
For those of us who are unsure of precisely what a citation is, the Oxford English Dictionary says:
- CITATION: noun
- 1. a quotation from or reference to a book, paper, or author, especially in a scholarly work.
So then I recalled we have another tag for quotations in the form of <q>. From the spec again:
Q is intended for short quotations (inline content) that don’t require paragraph breaks.
Hmm. So should I be using cite or q to contain quotations? A sensible answer would seem to be use q for quotations from and cite for references to. But let’s consider the default rendering on the world’s most widely used browser (IE/Win): cite is shown in italic whereas q is not differentiated at all. No quote marks, no italics, no nothing. That’ll be why I’ve never bothered with q then.
During his internal battle with this issue (9 months ago – I’m way behind), Mark exposed some smart CSS2 code to deal with q. Compliant browsers got nice quote marks and IE/Win got italicized text:
Q {
font-style:italic
quotes: '201C' '201D' '2018' '2019';
}
Q:before {
content: open-quote;
}
Q:after {
content: close-quote;
}
HTML > BODY Q {
font-style:normal;
}Mark later back-pedalled and scrapped all use of q. His reason being that JAWS, the popular screen reader, requires IE/Win and could not distinguish when a quotation was reached. Instead Mark chose a server side solution to replace q with quote marks. I’m gonna stick with the CSS method for time being; I reckon that written context and the odd comma should be enough indication to the listener when something is a quotation or not (I could be wrong…).
Which brings me back to cite. One of the reasons that I’ve never used it to mark up a reference to a source is because that’s often done with a link (but only visually, not meaningfully). What a shame there’s no href attribute; this would be nice:
<p><cite href="http://www.clagnut.com/">Richard Rutter</cite> went on about tedious markup and bored everyone to tears.</p>
And now for a little bit of politics. John Le Carré writes in the Times Online, I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head prefect’s sophistries to this colonialist adventure
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Web standards · War & Politics · Mark-up techniques
Eric wrote:
I think use of Q versus CITE is defined in the spec definition of Q. Q is for an inline quotation, cite is perhaps better used for inserting a paragraph of text from another source or as used by Mark.
Also, with JAWS, couldn’t you add some aural style to the Q element to make up for that which JAWS does not deliver by default.
Jay wrote:
But….but…. I’m confused.
What about the BLOCKQUOTE tag, which is described as the brother of the Q tag used for longer quotations? It’s got a CITE attribute which I use liberally.
It seems like we have three things here no? Citations to, short citations from and long citations from.
Have I been misusing the A tag in thinking that it was a citation to?
Oh this is far too confusing…
MJR wrote:
One of the proposed improvements in XHTML 2.0 is that the ‘href’ attribute becomes one of the core attributes that can be added to any element.
This means that although the <a> element becomes redundant, the use of <cite href=”...”></cite> is valid and would create a link. How lovely!
mandabug wrote:
HOW THE HELL DO YOU CITE AN EMBEDDED QUOTE?
?!?