Tags: cite
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Monday, April 26th, 2021
Wednesday, March 31st, 2021
Excitement is a fleeting moment, not a steady state
Most work is pretty mundane. Even work on meaningful things. The most profound stuff is built one mostly boring brick at a time. Even the most creative ideas, the best art, the breakthroughs have to be assembled, and assembly isn’t typically what fires people up.
You don’t get to the exhilarating end without going through the mundane middle. And the beginning and end are the shortest parts — the middle is most of it.
Wednesday, September 19th, 2018
HTML elements, unite! The Voltron-like powers of combining elements. | CSS-Tricks
This great post by Mandy ticks all my boxes! It’s a look at the combinatorial possibilities of some of the lesser-known HTML elements: abbr
, cite
, code
, dfn
, figure
, figcaption
, kbd
, samp
, and var
.
Friday, April 6th, 2018
Understandable excitement
An Event Apart Seattle just wrapped. It was a three-day special edition and it was really rather good. Lots of the speakers (myself included) were unveiling brand new talks, so there was a real frisson of excitement.
It was interesting to see repeating, overlapping themes. From a purely technical perspective, three technologies that were front and centre were:
- CSS grid,
- variable fonts, and
- service workers.
From listening to other attendees, the overwhelming message received was “These technologies are here—they’ve arrived.” Now, depending on your mindset, that understanding can be expressed as “Oh shit! These technologies are here!” or “Yay! Finally! These technologies are here!”
My reaction is very firmly the latter. That in itself is an interesting data-point, because (as discussed in my talk) my reaction towards new technological advances isn’t always one of excitement—quite often it’s one of apprehension, even fear.
I’ve been trying to self-analyse to figure out which kinds of technologies trigger which kind of reaction. I don’t have any firm answers yet, but it’s interesting to note that the three technologies mentioned above (CSS grid, variable fonts, and service workers) are all additions to the core languages of the web—the materials we use to build the web. Frameworks, libraries, build tools, and other such technologies are more like tools than materials. I tend to get less excited about advances in those areas. Sometimes advances in those areas not only fail to trigger excitement, they make me feel overwhelmed and worried about falling behind.
Since figuring out this split between materials and tools, it has helped me come to terms with my gut emotional reaction to the latest technological advances on the web. I think it’s okay that I don’t get excited about everything. And given the choice, I think maybe it’s healthier to be more excited about advances in the materials—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript APIs—than advances in tooling …although, it is, of course, perfectly possible to get equally excited about both (that’s just not something I seem to be able to do).
Another split I’ve noticed is between technologies that directly benefit users, and technologies that directly benefit developers. I think there was a bit of a meta-thread running through the talks at An Event Apart about CSS grid, variable fonts, and service workers: all of those advances allow us developers to accomplish more with less. They’re good for performance, in other words. I get much more nervous about CSS frameworks and JavaScript libraries that allow us to accomplish more, but require the user to download the framework or library first. It feels different when something is baked into browsers—support for CSS features, or JavaScript APIs. Then it feels like much more of a win-win situation for users and developers. If anything, the onus is on developers to take the time and do the work and get to grips with these browser-native technologies. I’m okay with that.
Anyway, all of this helps me understand my feelings at the end of An Event Apart Seattle. I’m fired up and eager to make something with CSS grid, variable fonts, and—of course—service workers.
Sunday, April 24th, 2016
Conversational interfaces
Psst… Jeremy! Right now you’re getting notified every time something is posted to Slack. That’s great at first, but now that activity is increasing you’ll probably prefer dialing that down.
What’s happening?
Why does everyone always look at me? I know I’m a chalkboard and that’s my job, I just wish people would ask before staring at me. Sometimes I don’t have anything to say.
I’m Little MOO - the bit of software that will be managing your order with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done and on it’s way to you.
It looks like you’re writing a letter.
Your quest is to find the Warlock’s treasure, hidden deep within a dungeon populated with a multitude of terrifying monsters. You will need courage, determination and a fair amount of luck if you are to survive all the traps and battles, and reach your goal — the innermost chambers of the Warlock’s domain.
Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?
I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.
ÆLFRED MECH HET GEWYRCAN
Ælfred ordered me to be made
Technical note
I have marked up the protagonist of each conversation using the cite
element. There is a long-running dispute over the use of this element. In HTML 4.01 it was perfectly fine to use cite
to mark up a person being quoted. In the HTML Living Standard, usage has been narrowed:
The
cite
element represents the title of a work (e.g. a book, a paper, an essay, a poem, a score, a song, a script, a film, a TV show, a game, a sculpture, a painting, a theatre production, a play, an opera, a musical, an exhibition, a legal case report, a computer program, etc). This can be a work that is being quoted or referenced in detail (i.e. a citation), or it can just be a work that is mentioned in passing.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.
In the examples above, it’s pretty clear that I, Pencil and Warlock Of Firetop Mountain are valid use cases for the cite
element according to the HTML5 definition; they are titles of works. But what about Clippy or Little Moo or Slackbot? They’re not people …but they’re not exactly titles of works either.
If I were to mark up a dialogue between Eliza and a human being, should I only mark up Eliza’s remarks with cite
? In text transcripts of conversations with Alexa, Siri, or Cortana, should only their side of the conversation get attributed as a source? Or should they also be written without the cite
element because it must not be used to mark up people’s names …even though they are not people, according to conventional definition.
It’s downright botist.
Friday, December 11th, 2015
An Event’s Lifecycle: The Highs, The Lows, The Silence // beyond tellerrand
I can certainly relate to everything Marc describes here. You spend all your time devoted to putting on an event; it’s in the future, coming towards you; you’re excited and nervous …and then the event happens, it’s over before you know it, and the next day there’s nothing—this thing that was dominating your horizon is now behind you. Now what?
I think if you’ve ever put something out there into the world, this is going to resonate with you.
Tuesday, November 5th, 2013
cite and blockquote – reloaded | HTML5 Doctor
The definition of the cite element (and the blockquote element) has been changed for the better in HTML5 …at least in the W3C version anyway.
Monday, August 19th, 2013
Bruce Lawson’s personal site : On citing quotations. Again.
The semantics of the cite element are up for discussion again. Bruce, like myself, still thinks that we should be allowed to mark up names with the cite element (as per HTML 4), and also that cite elements should be allowed inside blockquotes to indicate the source of the quote.
Let’s pave that cowpath.