Semantic, or useful?
Inspired by the semantic elegance of Slide 12 in Tantek’s The Elements Of Meaningful XHTML presentation, I threw together a Firefox extension to do the work for me: select some text, right-click and select BlogQuote, and it wraps the text in a <blockquote> with a cite attribute and puts the page title (a first crack at getting a name-thing, maybe later I’ll try to parse things like meta elements and the dc:creator in TrackBack RDF) in a cite element, and copies the whole thing to the clipboard, so you’re ready to paste
<p><cite>Eric Meyer</cite> wrote:</p>
<blockquote cite="http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/03/11/social-protocols/">
<p>What's so interesting to me is that the guys who decided
to focus on the positive went out and did something;
those who want to mix in the negative seem to have
nothing to offer except complaints.</p></blockquote>
into a post. (Well, okay, you’ll be pasting <cite>Eric’s Archived Thoughts: Social Protocols</cite> wrote:, but it’s a first cut.) But here’s the problem: it’s useless blogging. It gives you (with a little cite editing):
Eric Meyer wrote:
What’s so interesting to me is that the guys who decided to focus on the positive went out and did something; those who want to mix in the negative seem to have nothing to offer except complaints.
which causes me to complain “where’s my bloody link?” Browsers don’t do anything with the cite attribute, and the cite element doesn’t have any attribute to provide a URI for the citation, and if it did browsers probably wouldn’t do anything with it, and I need a link, damn it!
The cite element can contain a link, which makes semantic sense to me, but is likely to foul up its use as million dollar markup, or a link can contain a cite element, but either way around I don’t want to imply by my link that Eric Meyer == http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/03/11/social-protocols/.
Is what I actually want
<p>In <a href="http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/03/11/social-protocols/"><cite>Social Protocols</cite></a>, <a href="http://meyerweb.com/"><cite>Eric Meyer</cite></a> wrote:</p>
(since, after all, one may cite a publication like the New York Times or an article like Mac Browser Roundup, or a weblog article like Social Protocols), or am I in danger of disappearing up my own semantic navel?
Or you add the traditional link as the last line in the blockquote. But to keep it more or less semantic, use the name of the source as link text, not simply ’link’ like Boingboing annoyingly does.
In either case, it is a workaround for browsers that don’t autogenerate such links. And browsers have no incentive to autogenerate such links, because that would usually duplicate a real link already put in, or in the vicinity of, the blockquote. Conclusion: adding the cite attribute would be wasteful duplication. A single
citeelement insideblockquoteis good enough for million dollar markup.<p><cite>Eric Meyer</cite> wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What's so interesting to me ...</p>
<p>(Link: <a href="http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/03/11/social-protocols/"><cite>Social protocols</cite></a>)</p>
</blockquote>