citeVia

Since I first wrote about hVia on Friday, there’s been some good discussion going on. We’re calling the idea ‘citeVia’ now, but that’s really just a working name and could easily be changed.

Our initial proposal was basically to do this for via links:

Via <cite class="via"><a href="http://www.example.com">Mr. Example</a></cite>

After comments from Tantek, we realized that the whole issue of citation in HTML is an undefinted area. There doesn’t seem to be any specified connection between <cite>, <blockquote> and <q>.

Tantek brings up the cite-a vs. a-cite issue. Mainly, he askes what else a cite tag wrapped around an a tag could mean beside a via-link. While it would be nice to have come up with a new HTML compound, I think things are trickier than that.

I think Eran does a nice job of summarizing the issues in this comment.

I think Eran and I finally understand Tantek’s oringinal point. However, it still seems necessary to use class=”via” to disambiguate the via-links. For us, a via-link is different that a regular citation. Often you’ll want to quote from a particular blog, but point out that you found out about that content somewhere else. The via-link is to the intermediary, not the source.

I’m not sure where to go from here. Tantek, I’m not sure if we’re not understanding each other or Eran and I just aren’t getting it. Either way, we need more input from anyone’s who’s interested.

In conclusion, a couple notes:

  • Bud Gibson has used citeVia here
  • We’ve pretty much dropped the idea of citations that don’t have a link. Those probably aren’t very interesting.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 10:07 pm.

5 Responses to “citeVia”

  1. aaron Says:
    May 10th, 2005 at 9:41 pm

    dammit, man, write about something i understand…

  2. ryan Says:
    May 10th, 2005 at 9:52 pm

    aaron-
    Why don’t you just write something?

    :-)

  3. Joseph Scott Says:
    May 14th, 2005 at 7:32 pm

    I just thought I’d through out another idea here, what about the label tag? I know it is intended to be used with forms, but it might work for this as well. Something like this:

    <a id=”unique_id” href=”http://www.example.com”>Example.com</a> found via <label for=”unique_id”><a href=”http://www.somewhere.com/”>Somewhere.com</a>

    I was playing with some forms and this popped into my head while adding labels for the form fields.

  4. Joseph Scott Says:
    May 14th, 2005 at 11:14 pm

    Yes, I forgot the closing label tag in the above example.

  5. Hellonline » Blog Archive » citeRel is the new citeVia Says:
    June 19th, 2005 at 4:00 pm

    […]

    citeRel is the new citeVia

    I started thinking about citeVia again after a conversation with Ashton the other day about tracking a conversati […]