Sorry about the initial post: I didn't realize that Bugzilla would auto-encode all of the HTML markup I entered. Below is a cleaned-up version of the initial post that takes into account this auto-encoding:


According to the current W3C draft of HTML5, the <cite> element (http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/text-level-semantics.html#the-cite-element) represents the title of a work. Currently, there is no way to succinctly specify a link to the full citation of a source in a scholarly citation format, such as the MLA or APA formats. This shortcoming results in a diminished markup language where one has to resort to using anchors (http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/text-level-semantics.html#the-a-element) which, while succeeds in getting the job done of providing a link to the full scholarly citation in an article, really should be part of the cite tag because of the tight semantic coupling of a source citation and a scholarly citation.

For example, the first citation in the Wikipedia article on Mercurial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurial) could be enhanced by using markup such as:

<cite fullcitation="cite_note-announced-0">[1]</cite>

as opposed to the current mechanism:

<a href="#cite_note-announced-0" wotsearchprocessed="true"><span>[</span>1<span>]</span></a>


Furthermore, this modification to the <cite> tag would turn the discovery algorithm of a article citaiton analysis and visualization program trivial and much less error prone than the current mechanisms utilized for linking to the full citation of a source.

Please consider my proposed addition to the HTML5 language and provide feedback. Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

I don't understand what problem this solves. Surely <a href=""> is orders of magnitude better as a solution for citing other works than any of the old-style citation format like MLA or APA.

The modification of the cite tag as described above would allow for the combined benefits of allowing browsers and spider programs catalog citations (and the source for their citation, which in a scholarly article is *not always a URL*) and allow users to jump to the source being cited.

For an example of what I am talking about, please refer to http://liturgica.com/html/litJLitHist1.jsp. On this page, we have a number of citations of non-web based materials, such as books and magazine articles. Currently, we are using the anchor tag, but when we migrate it to HTML 5, I believe it makes logical sense for us to be using the cite tag. However, I believe that it makes little sense to have a cite tag without that cite tag having a way to reference in some form or another the actual source of the citation, whether it be a web page or a book or an article.

This seems to have been fixed - you can put in whatever makes sense as a citation convention: https://w3c.github.io/html/textlevel-semantics.html#the-cite-element