Just give it time until <cite/> is expanded into an MLA Microformat.
Yeah, that’s right W3C: keep adding more random tags to HTML that can map to just about anything in different browsers! Meanwhile the fundamental flaws of CSS stay. It would’ve been better to have Microsoft or Adobe or any coherent team design HTML/CSS and get it right. Instead a bunch of squabbling factions, whose main purpose is to ensure none of their competitors get an edge create the monstrosity that is HTML and CSS today.
They endlessly argued about well-formed this and that and whether it should be or . Meanwhile getting things done requires that one keeps up with the idiosyncrasies of different browsers, caused in good part by an under-specified standard with no reference implementation.
It’s nice to see nothing whatsoever was learned by the earlier travails of C++, and essentially they started in a vacuum without looking at how things had been done before. Nobody hires people to style a Word document, but you certainly do have to hire somebody to create any non-trivial page with CSS (oooh, tables are bad because they threaten the livelihood of idiots like Dave “I am not and will never be a real programmer, but being able to bend a computer to my will often proves useful” csszengarden Shea)
…
Whoa! That’s quite a rant, brought on by some web development these last few days. I guess the link below summarizes some great reasons why CSS is flawed in its fundamental design, not because the EEEVIL Microsoft sabotaged it
http://www.cybergrain.com/archives/2004/12/css_considered.html
— Rob 
All these years, I’ve been using the cite element incorrectly
Darn, me too.
— Michael R. Bernstein
I’m not impressed; they’re taking away my right to cite a person (I wasn’t using it to attribute a quote to a ship, so I’m okay there) and leaving me with what…? They suggest using ‘b’, if I’m a gossip column (which I am only rarely, and that in real life more than online, and thus not marked up semantically), otherwise ’span’, if it’s really necessary.
And here I was thinking HTML5’s main driver was replacing all those generic spans and divs with more “semantic” nonsense like ’section’ and ‘footer’.
-p
If so many people use the element incorrectly, the spec is wrong.
Rob: Whilst there are certainly problems with CSS (both the spec and the implementations), it’s not really within the scope of the HTML Working Group to fix those things.
PeterMHoward: In all the time you’ve been using what benefits have you experienced from using it?
— jgraham
Ahoy’hoy!
You’ve only been wrong if you’ve been authoring (draft) HTML5 … I can’t see anything in HTML4 restricting use of CITE in this way :)
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#edef-CITE
— Ben Boyle
The 4.01 document actually cites a name in its examples! And HTML5 actually recommends ‘b’? So until every browser on the planet updates (and IE still doesn’t support the 8+ year old XHTML yet) we’ll all have names formatted in bold? Or have to have CSS to work around the current meaning of a tag :(
— Pete
I’d take no notice if I were you; as long as the end result complies with the rules of English grammar when viewed through all web browsers -not to mention screen readers- then you can safely ignore these proclamations as pedantic claptrap and carry on as you were.
— Jake
All these years, I’ve been using the cite element incorrectly
Damn, Were you really using HTML5 during so many years?
I must have been lost in some alternate universe where no user-agent/authoring-tool/validator supports HTML5 yet :/
— maeghith
And here all this time I thought it was for making links to webcites.
— Devon
What about Titanic? How should I mark that up? Or more importantly, Gerry Anderson’s critically acclaimed Stingray?
— Mark
> What about Titanic? How should I mark that up?
<xhtml2>
— Mark
According to my dictionary, “cite” is a transitive verb (from Latin citare, summon). There is “citation” as a noun.
As a verb, the dictionary gives “cite” as:
to quote (a passage, book, etc.),
to refer to or mention by way of example, etc.,
to mention in a citation (official honourable … service in the armed forces), and
to summon to appear before a court of law.
As a noun “citation” as:
a quoting,
a passage cited,
official honourable mention for meritorious service in the armed forces,
a summons to appear before a court of law,
a reference to a legal statute, etc.
What are the adverbs or adjectives? Assuming these would map on to attributes of an action or object.
Similarly, we have “quote” and “quotation”.
I realize that there will be some historical baggage from previous versions of HTML to bloat HTML5, but the HTML5 spec. seems to be losing sight of the purpose of HTML (i.e. hyper text mark-up language). Me thinks, they might need a small set of easy to remember elements. Perhaps with the degradable object element (where the browser renders the first/best it can of a cascade/list of object representations [if the server is too stupid to choose for the browser]). Extensibility with the div and span element seems useful, so that an XML can be converted easily in to HTML (and back again), or you can do the tag soup thing (invent your own new tags to mark up bits of your document).
Also the spec. seems to be a set of rules, rather than a set of behaviours, although I cannot decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
— Bobby
@jgraham: None, as I’m sure you’re aware; it’s not like there are agents picking up relationships between ‘cite’ elements and the nearest quote; I’ll grant, because of that, that ‘cite’ needs work — I’d like a better (more explicit) way to attribute a quote to someone; my pet example is marking up dialogue (cf http://wintermute.com.au/bits/2006-12/markup-for-dialogue/, where I didn’t actually reach a solution).
But the lack of a tangible benefit is no reason to include a restriction like this (cf, the example in HTML4 spec linked above), _especially_ without offering an alternative (’b’ isn’t one).
-p
Using for cited people’s names was always correct according to the HTML 4 specification, but always incorrect according to all significant visual Web browsers, because they italicize the element (or in the case of some text browsers, underline it). Outside of HTML, nobody renders the names of cited people and uncited people differently that way, and there’s no reason HTML should be different. You probably realized this about ten seconds before you first specified “cite {font-style: normal;}” in your site’s style sheet, a practice you’ve followed through several redesigns.
That the HTML 5 draft gives more weight to real Web browser behavior than to the HTML 4 specification should not be a surprise either. It’s been doing that for years now.
— mpt
I don’t know if you caught this or not Mark, but the spec itself contains an example of using cite on an author.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#semantics0 suggests using the cite element to denote the authorship of a quote, even though the definition of the element prohibits this.