HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
<cite>
In HTML 4, the
<cite>
element could be used to mark up the
name of a speaker:
As <CITE>Harry S. Truman</CITE> said,<Q lang=”en-us”>
¬
The buck stops here.</Q>
HTML5 disallows this: “A person's name is not the title of a
work— even if people call that person a piece of work— and the
element must therefore not be used to mark up people's names.”
This is bonkers. It makes existing content that conforms to the
rules of HTML 4 nonconforming to the rules of HTML5, although
it will never be fl agged as invalid by a validator, as a machine
has no way of knowing that “Harry S. Truman” is a name rather
than the title of a biography called “Harry S. Truman.”
In his 24ways.org article, “Incite a riot”, Jeremy Keith wrote “Join
me in a campaign of civil disobedience against the unnecessarily
restrictive, backwards-incompatible change to the
cite
element.”
I agree. Use
<cite>
for names if you want to.
<address>
<address>
is for contact details of the author of the current
<article>
or document, not as a generic element for postal
addresses. The contact details can be email address, postal
address, or any others. These can be marked up as a micro-
format, RDFa, or microdata if you wish.
What's new is that you can have multiple addresses in a docu-
ment, one inside each
<article>
. Author information associated
with an
article
element does not apply to nested article ele-
ments, so a blog post in an
<article>
can have an
<address>
for
its author, and each blog comment (which you remember is a
nested
<article>
) can have the
<address>
of its commenter.
<em>, <i>
em
marks up emphasis of the kind that subtly changes the mean-
ing of a sentence; if the question is “Did you say you live in
Paris?” the answer might be marked up as
<p>No, my <em>name</em> is Paris. I live in <em>Troy</em>.
¬
Cloth-ears.</p>
