I argued with a friend this morning about the citeelement in HTML. I thought <cite> could only be placed at the end of a blockquote element to indicate the source of the quote. And she thought it was for define citations in a paragraph while I thought that the q element was for them. But we were both wrong.

As it’s said in the W3C HTML 4.01 Specification, CITE contains a citation or a reference to other sources.. Well, the example is more explicit:

As <cite>Harry S. Truman</cite> said,
<q lang="en-us">The buck stops here.</q>

The cite element is mostly used to define who said something.

That’s quite confusing, isn’t it? <cite>, <q> and <blockquote cite=""> are really different, but are used for the same thing: quotes.