Comments on: SimpleQuiz › Part VIII › Titles

By: Remo

Remo — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 18:59:19 +0000

when you see the www as a "collection of information", then "SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup" should lead you to more information about that book. so i'd go for an anchor:

My upcoming book, SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup, will be a bestseller.

By: Jean-Francois

Jean-Francois — Thu, 25 Dec 2003 22:37:41 +0000

The Web being what it is (interactive, remember), I would certainly go with a link to the book site or something along that line. That’s what makes it such an efficient time black hole.

By: Swannie

Swannie — Thu, 09 Oct 2003 15:24:55 +0000

First of all, as I understand it XHTML is not semantic, it is structured syntax. The tag that you choose to "mark" data with is really up to you. To my semantic web agent it's just data and has no meaning.

In this case I think that ... is the most syntactically clear, as it implies to the human reader good semantics. To get proper semantics you would need to annotate the cite with some RDF/XML to a widely recognised ontology that recognises citation of book titles.

BurningBird on Cite and RDF explains it in a pretty good way.

By: Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson — Tue, 07 Oct 2003 11:57:36 +0000

Q and BLOCKQUOTE have the ‘cite’ attribute where a URL can be entered (as, in fact, do the INS and DEL elements).
see: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#adef-cite-Q
“The value of this attribute is a URI that designates a source document or message. This attribute is intended to give information about the source from which the quotation was borrowed.”

By: Millennium

Millennium — Mon, 06 Oct 2003 16:57:55 +0000

It sounds to me as though CITE is one of those wonderful mis-specified or under-specified tags. W3C’s own examples would seem to indicate that Option C is correct -and I believe it is- but their statement is worded in such a way that it doesn’t sound like it should be correct. Bad wording on their part, probably.
Structurally, a book title could be considered a kind of citation. Recall that some titles are italicized (or underlined when italics are not possible), while others are put into quotes, and so forth. With the different ways of expressing these things, it’s fairly clear that it’s a structural matter, not a visual one. Thus, I can’t be correct any more than U would be. Likewise, EM can’t be correct, because you’re not emphasizing the text. C would seem to be correct, but the tag doesn’t have a very good name for this sort of thing.
Frankly, Q and BLOCKQUOTE should have some sort of attribute -or perhaps an element contained within, as with the fieldset/legend pair- for defining the source. Perhaps a SOURCE tag with an href attribute so that name and address can be specified. With that inconsistency dealt with, then CITE chould become The One True Way for marking up titles, with all the ambiguity at last resolved.

By: xian

xian — Sun, 05 Oct 2003 02:36:30 +0000

I’ve always used the (c) example (cite) even with a vague sense that it was not semantically ideal. Frankly, I’m waiting for a web-authoring interface that says, “I see you are trying to apply italics. Is this because you want emphasis, the term is from a foreign language, the term is the title of a work, or another reason? If it’s another reason, please teach me.” Then my imaginary HTML/CSS wizard would whip up a good class rule to apply.

By: AcjBizar

AcjBizar — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 18:20:44 +0000

I would go for option c. I think it's the most semantically correct. Option a is simply wrong. Like the W3C states, and I quote: The following HTML elements specify font information. Although they are not all deprecated, their use is discouraged in favor of style sheets. In reference to the elements tt, i, b, big, small, strike, s, and u. 'Nuff said.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 28 Sep 2003 03:48:10 +0000

With reference to Jeff Nelson’s use of , surely this is an example of where is required. There are no semantics (or meaning) to be highlighted, nor is there necessarily any visual emphasis required. However an aural user agent needs to know that the language has changed so the appropriate pronunciation can be used, so seems entirely correct here. Since it is a convention in some languages to italicize foreign words and phrases, it could be styled using a CSS attribute selector.
I would suggest that s, could be used for marking up other text which is conventionally highlighted in some way, such as names of ships, artwork, etc, with a suitable classification.
Perhaps there ought to be a standard way of documenting such classification schemes in meta data – does Dublin Core provide the means of doing this?.

By: Simon Jessey

Simon Jessey — Sat, 27 Sep 2003 05:31:04 +0000
I would go for The Title Of The Book, although you won't find it happening very often on my own web site (I usually use ). Basically, I would treat the element as a generic element that covers these situations. A similar example would be the element, which will be used, in the future, to markup all abbreviations, whether they be acronyms, recursive acronyms, initialisms, or just plain old abbreviations. I often wonder if these lengthy discussions about XHTML semantics are really necessary. XHTML is a markup language for describing a document, not for describing data. Semantic value is nice when you can have it, but it's hardly the end of the world if you can't. If the Semantic Web takes off, it will not be built on XHTML, but on RDF (or something similar). I'm not a fan of the italic and bold elements. I prefer the emphasis and strong emphasis equivalents for their accessibilty advantages. Although I've seen many arguments that suggest otherwise, I don't regard and to have semantic value, so I don't use them at all.

By: Shaun Inman

Shaun Inman — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 08:06:37 +0000
This is in response to jgraham regarding a browser plug-in that can extract links, lists, definitions, etc. I whipped up a JavaScript favelet that addresses your first request: Extract Links Just drag that to your bookmark bar and press it to open a new window with a list all the links from the page you are currently viewing. I'm sure it can be expanded on to extract other tags as well. Cheers all! (Sorry for skirting my question Dan, commenting would have felt like laughing at my own joke ;D)