exomel / Weblog entry / The cite element

The cite element

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.

There are 10 comments yet. Don't be shy.

1. On September 29th, 2005 at 9:35 am, mireille said :: but.. why would you want to put in italics the person who said something?

2. On September 29th, 2005 at 11:30 am, Remi said :: Mireille, that’s something you don’t seem to understand ;-) The cite element is used to give “meaning” to data, you can easily remove the italic style.

3. On September 29th, 2005 at 11:53 am, mireille said :

I do understand! But the ‘default’ style still is italic. And often you don’t have control over how your element looks, as soon as you’re not the one writing the stylesheet.

But, anyway, I guess it doesn’t matter that much, since it’s only for my not-very-CSSy livejournal ;) Thanks for researching!