On Jan 11, 2007, at 7:01 AM, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
At 14:42 +1300 UTC, on 2007-01-07, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
On Jan 7, 2007, at 7:13 AM, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
...
It's still entirely unclear to me *why* the cite attribute needs a
replacement. What is wrong with it?
First, it's hard for UAs to present cite= in a way that is both usable
and backward compatible.
I'm assuming your "unusable" refers to the text in parenthesis
(below), but it's not clear to me what you mean with "backward
compatible presentation of the cite attribute by UAs". Are you talking
about a new UA version doing something different with the cite
attribute than the previous version did?
Yes, where what the previous version did = nothing.
...
The fact that UI problems like this aren't solved yet does not mean
they cannot be solved. Just that they haven't been solved yet. I'm
sure that to a large extend this has to do with UA vendors having
spent resources on browser wars and ESP engines for the past 10 years,
at the cost of other development.
You may be right.
...
Second, it's hard for authors to use it in a way that is
backward-compatible. That is, if the source information is important
enough that it needs to be accessible in those UAs that don't (yet)
support cite=, the author has to provide the information in some other
fashion too.
Yeah, but as a spec writer you then risk entering the terrain of
dumbing down the Web for everyone, just because some people are still
using lousy UAs.
Good luck convincing people that their browser is lousy because it
doesn't present citations. I expect the typical response would be "Eh?"
Some of us feel that such information should be *available* but not
*visible* per se, because making it visible will often only lead to
distraction from the actual text.
Ah, but we already have a thoroughly compatible element for conditional
presentation of information: <a>. So a backward-compatible way of
citing sources would be an attribute that points to either <a> (if the
full citation should be out of the flow of text), or to another element
(if it should be inline).
For example:
<p><a id="q018" href="http://example.com/2007/01/21/c";>Fred
Mondegreen concurs</a>: <q source="#q018">When you compare it
with books, the Web is still a newborn baby</q>.</p>
<p>As <span id="q019">Albert Einstein said during an interview
in 1949</span>: <q source="#q019">I do not know how the Third
World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use
in the Fourth — rocks!</q></p>
(Disclaimer: I don't expect people would actually use this, unless
there was some famous semantic application taking advantage of it. The
same applies to cite=.)
...
And third, it requires the existence of an IRI of some sort. Often you
won't have this, for example when the source information for your
quote is something as vague as "attributed to Mark Twain".
I think that in such a case it would be appropriate to have the cite
attribute's content point to the source that attributes it to Twain,
like so:
<q cite="URL">To be, or not to be</q>, as Mark Twain supposedly said.
Google notwithstanding, the Web does not contain all quotable material
that exists. If the source is a pamphlet, magazine, user manual, or
interview, there may well be *no* relevant URL to cite.
Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
