cite (HTML attribute)
Example
The cite
attribute is used in conjunction with both the del and
ins elements below:
<p>Bernie enjoyed nothing more than a <del
cite="http://berniesworld.com/drag.html"
datetime="2007-11-05T23:31:05Z">night out on the town at his
favorite drag queen show</del> <ins
cite="http://berniesworld.com/drag.html"
datetime="2007-11-05T23:33:32Z">quiet night in with a warm cup of
cocoa</ins></p>
Description
Perhaps the reason why the
del element was used to change the page content is
explained in an external document. In such cases, you can use the
cite attribute to point users to that
document.
Value
This element takes as its value a reference to another document in the form of a URI.
Compatibility
| IE | 5.5 | None |
|---|---|---|
| 6.0 | None | |
| 7.0 | None | |
| Firefox | 1.0 | None |
| 1.5 | None | |
| 2.0 | None | |
| Safari | 1.3 | None |
| 2.0 | None | |
| 3.0 | None | |
| Opera | 9.2 | None |
| 9.5 | None |
None of the browsers
we tested do anything useful with the cite
attribute. It would be possible to use DOM scripting to retrieve this
information for some purpose, but natively, the most that any of the
tested browsers can do with cite is shown in the
Firefox screenshot in Figure 1. To access this
information, I had to right-click on the text and select
Properties from the menu displayed.
cite properties as found in
Firefox
Given that no visual clue is provided to indicate that the
ins and del content has anything
extra to reveal, few people would ever discover this information. And even
if they did, the URI of the document isn’t clickable, nor is the date
formatted in a friendly way.
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