Are you saying that <cite will italicize on the page without spoken emphasis? Cool! That'll be much easier for me to remember (and code) than the <span code that another commenter suggested.
I thought you were going to use semantic mark-up?
Please don't go back to 1990's HTML coding where people used whichever tag got them the appearance they wanted, regardless of what the tag was supposed to mean!
"q" is easy enough to understand: you can use it to indicate that something is a quotation from somewhere else. (You can even indicate the source URL if you want: Joe Smith said, <q cite="http://www.example.com/page.html">I could do with a beer</q>.) It's an inline element, so it's probably better for shorter quotations.
Longer ones (a paragraph or more) are probably better expressed with "blockquote" (which also has the optional "cite" attribute if you want to provide a source URL). That one's a block-level element, so you can wrap one or more "p" elements inside it.
Note that some browsers (e.g. Opera), but not all, enclose "q" quotations in quotation marks -- so if you add quotation marks yourself, you'll have two pairs in some browsers, but if you leave them out, then browsers which don't add quotation marks won't show where the quotation starts and ends. What I usually do is italicise the quotation with <q style="font-style: italic">...quotation goes here...</q>.
The visual browsers I'm familiar with don't apply any particular font style to "q" quotations (or to "blockquote" ones, though they usually indent them).
I find "cite" hard to pin down the exact use of; the spec merely says that "the usual meaning" is "contains a citation or a reference to other sources", and the examples given are: As <CITE>Harry S. Truman said, <Q lang="en-us">The buck stops here.</Q> and More information can be found in <CITE>[ISO-0000]</CITE>.
So I suppose it's reasonable mark-up for book titles, but not (for example) for quoting someone or representing the voice on the other end of a telephone or thoughts, even if those are things you might want to mark up with italics and even if <cite> is often rendered as italics in visual browsers. Other than book titles, I'm not sure what the "cite" tag can properly be used for. (If you're going to use it improperly, then in my opinion you might as well go ahead and use the "i" tag, which at least doesn't even claim to indicate any particular meaning.)
no subject
I thought you were going to use semantic mark-up?
Please don't go back to 1990's HTML coding where people used whichever tag got them the appearance they wanted, regardless of what the tag was supposed to mean!
Use the tag that describes what you're doing.
But what's the difference between <q> and <cite>?
"q" is for quotations; "cite" is for citations or references to other sources (links are to the HTML specification).
"q" is easy enough to understand: you can use it to indicate that something is a quotation from somewhere else. (You can even indicate the source URL if you want:
Joe Smith said, <q cite="http://www.example.com/page.html">I could do with a beer</q>.) It's an inline element, so it's probably better for shorter quotations.Longer ones (a paragraph or more) are probably better expressed with "blockquote" (which also has the optional "cite" attribute if you want to provide a source URL). That one's a block-level element, so you can wrap one or more "p" elements inside it.
Note that some browsers (e.g. Opera), but not all, enclose "q" quotations in quotation marks -- so if you add quotation marks yourself, you'll have two pairs in some browsers, but if you leave them out, then browsers which don't add quotation marks won't show where the quotation starts and ends. What I usually do is italicise the quotation with
<q style="font-style: italic">...quotation goes here...</q>.The visual browsers I'm familiar with don't apply any particular font style to "q" quotations (or to "blockquote" ones, though they usually indent them).
I find "cite" hard to pin down the exact use of; the spec merely says that "the usual meaning" is "contains a citation or a reference to other sources", and the examples given are:
As <CITE>Harry S. Truman said, <Q lang="en-us">The buck stops here.</Q>andMore information can be found in <CITE>[ISO-0000]</CITE>.So I suppose it's reasonable mark-up for book titles, but not (for example) for quoting someone or representing the voice on the other end of a telephone or thoughts, even if those are things you might want to mark up with italics and even if
<cite>is often rendered as italics in visual browsers. Other than book titles, I'm not sure what the "cite" tag can properly be used for. (If you're going to use it improperly, then in my opinion you might as well go ahead and use the "i" tag, which at least doesn't even claim to indicate any particular meaning.)