Proper use of cite tag for magazine articles.

[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

Normal publishing standards for references to magazine articles call
for putting the article title in quotes and the magazine title in
italics, thus:

See "The Taming of the Foo"
(<i>Shakespeari an Beats</i>, Vol. 2, No. 7, January, 1984)

Would proper use of the cite tage be to use it in place of the i tag,
to put the entire thing inside of cite, or neither?

Thanks.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT <http://patriot.net/~shmuel>

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[Jukka K. Korpela]

"Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz" <sp******@libra ry.lspace.org.i nvalid> wrote:

Normal publishing standards for references to magazine articles call
for putting the article title in quotes and the magazine title in
italics, thus:

See "The Taming of the Foo"
(<i>Shakespeari an Beats</i>, Vol. 2, No. 7, January, 1984)

Would proper use of the cite tage be to use it in place of the i tag,
to put the entire thing inside of cite, or neither?

I would use <cite> instead of <i>. It's a bit illogical in the sense that
I'm using <cite> for part of the citation only. But at least I'm saying
something about _why_ the words appear in italics

It's not a big issue though. There's not much to be gained in practice by
using <cite> instead of <i>.

If you put the entire citation inside <cite>,
See <cite>"The Taming of the Foo"
(<i>Shakespeari an Beats</i>, Vol. 2, No. 7, January, 1984)</cite>
then you would need to use CSS to override the default rendering:
cite { font-style: normal; }
and this does not sound very practical.

Someone might consider using
See <cite class="article" >The Taming of the Foo</cite>
(<cite>Shakespe arian Beats</cite>, Vol. 2, No. 7, January,
1984)</cite>
and some CSS to prevent cite.article from being rendered in italics
(easy, though naturally usual CSS caveats apply) and to make quotation
marks appear before and after (which requires CSS constructs that are not
supported by IE). Thus it's hardly a feasible option at all in Web
authoring.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Leif K-Brooks]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

There's not much to be gained in practice by using <cite> instead of <i>.

There's this: <http://tw.ecritters.bi z/view_entry.php? id=43>.

[la_haine]

"Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz" <sp******@libra ry.lspace.org.i nvalid> wrote in
news:40******** *************** ****@news.patri ot.net:

See "The Taming of the Foo"
(<i>Shakespeari an Beats</i>, Vol. 2, No. 7, January, 1984)

Would proper use of the cite tage be to use it in place of the i tag,
to put the entire thing inside of cite, or neither?

Use <cite> instead of <i>. <cite> describes what it is, wheras <i> just
says to visual browsers 'make this go a bit slanty'.

Most visual browsers seem to display <cite> content in italics, but you can
always use CSS to style a cite element however you like.

--
'My former wife is now living with a woman of the same sex'
- Caller, Radio 4

[Jukka K. Korpela]

"la_haine" <p.*****@kent.a c.uk> wrote:

Use <cite> instead of <i>. <cite> describes what it is, wheras <i>
just says to visual browsers 'make this go a bit slanty'.

It's my nitpicking day... It was the "a bit slanty" thing, you know.

<i> means italics. This in turn might mean different things. In classic
typography, italics is a special kind of font, designed as carefully as
upright font. In computers, italics fonts are often just slanted versions
of upright fonts, "mechanic italics" so to say.

On the more practical side, the use of italics works best with serif
fonts. In sans-serif fonts, the difference between upright and italics is
often too small to be noticeable enough. This is a somewhat problematic
and probably quite often makes people use <strong> instead of <em>
(or <b> instead of <i>) for even the slightest emphasis, when they
declare (or assume) the use of a sans-serif font like Arial.

It's hard to say how elements like <cite>, <em>, and <var> should be
presented in different situations, but in principle, a browser has the
liberty of using any method it finds suitable as the default.*) But with
<i>, there are no such liberties. If italics font cannot be used, then
there's hardly any other acceptable option than to ignore the <i> markup
(though someone might say that printing or uttering the texts "(italic)"
and "(end of italics) could constitute an acceptable presentation).

*) Similarly, a user style sheet could e.g. represent all of them
in normal font but with different distinctive background colors.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Matt]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

"la_haine" <p.*****@kent.a c.uk> wrote:

Use <cite> instead of <i>. <cite> describes what it is, wheras <i>
just says to visual browsers 'make this go a bit slanty'.

It's my nitpicking day... It was the "a bit slanty" thing, you know.

<i> means italics. This in turn might mean different things. In classic
typography, italics is a special kind of font, designed as carefully as
upright font. In computers, italics fonts are often just slanted versions
of upright fonts, "mechanic italics" so to say.

I'll nitpick even more, and say that an italic font is designed properly,
but an oblique font is simply slanted, usually by computer ;)

--
Matt
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[Andy Dingley]

This is a topic of some current interest to me. I'm working on making
a couple of large and heavily-referencing texts web-accessible.
There's also a bit of a SemWeb slant to it, so I'm keen to make as
much as possibel machine-processable, not just human-styled through
the CSS.

I'm also authoring in XHTML because (as I keep saying) this allows me
to use XML tools on it. The pages have embedded reference material,
and some XSLT pulls this out and automatically builds the navigable
table of contents and the references list.

Feedback and ideas are very welcome.

Here's an example fragment (no URL - it's not yet published)

<p>
<cite class="ref-book"
id="ref-edwards-civil_war_guns-1978"
title="Edwards, Civil War Guns"

<span class="author" >Edwards. William B.</span>

<span class="title" >Civil War Guns</span>.
<span class="publishe r" >Castle Books</span>.
<span class="publicat ion-date" >1978</span>.</cite>
</p>

<p>
On <q cite="#ref-edwards-civil_war_guns-1978" class="ref-page" >page
192</q>
is a notation that Remington-Beals handgun grips for commercial sale
were
to be varnished while those for the military were to be oil-finished.
<q cite="#ref-edwards-civil_war_guns-1978" class="ref-page" >Page
200</q>
contains notes that Staff had begun to make .58 caliber Springfields
for
the government. New power-driven stocking machines were installed and
the
only hand labor involved was the final sanding and oiling of the
stocks. On
<q cite="#ref-edwards-civil_war_guns-1978" class="ref-page" >page
303</q>,
in discussing the rifles of Christian Sharps, it is stated that the
buttstock
is to be of well-oiled walnut.
</p>

[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

In <cd**********@a thena.ukc.ac.uk >, on 07/15/2004
at 11:20 AM, "la_haine" <p.*****@kent.a c.uk> said:

Use <cite> instead of <i>. <cite> describes what it is,

No, the point of my question was that cite does *NOT* describe what it
is, because the title of the magazine is only part of the citation; it
just so happens that it is the only part that is supposed to be
rendered in italics. The title of the article, the volume and the
issue are just as much part of the citation, but they are not supposed
to be rendered in italics. I believe that the suggestion to use a
combination of nested cite tags and a class attribute is probably the
way to go.

See <cite class="art"><Q> The Taming of the Foo</Q>
(<cite>Shakespe arian Beats</cite>, Vol. 2, No. 7, January,
1984)</cite>

With appropriate style definitions.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT <http://patriot.net/~shmuel>

Unsolicited bulk E-mail subject to legal action. I reserve the
right to publicly post or ridicule any abusive E-mail. Reply to
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