I've come to realize that I have been mis-using the cite tag (i.e. for the title of a book that isn't actually being cited). The name of the tag itself leads to the obvious usage scenario and yet I've managed to mangle it. The structurally friendly method of marking up a title is, apparently, to use CSS (and I suppose a span tag). I find the span/css method to be somewhat unappealing, but I suppose if the W3C intended it to be that way then I guess I'll live with it.
My research into the cite tag has also led me to the blockquote tag. I've been wondering how the citation for a blockquote should be marked up. Apprently the correct method is to reference a URI in the cite attribute of the tag. I find this somewhat unappealing as well. Most browsers do nothing with the attribute, leaving no visual indicator of the source of a quotation. Obviously the citation is not part of the quote and so the cite should not be contained within the blockquote tag, but the natural relationship between the two is lost otherwise (at least structurally).
This also brings up the nature of the cite attribute. It should contain a URI referencing the source. Some of our sources are web-based, some are not. The URI set has subsets of URL and URN. The URL subset is well-known to me. The URN subset is not. Based on brief research the URN is a unique identifier maintained by discreet organizations (e.g. the ISBN). The URN appears to be preferable thanks to it's universal (i.e. web, print, multimedia) and persistent nature.
I've decided to mark up quotations in a way that is likely incorrect and redundant (at least for the time being). I'll use the q and blockquote tags along with the cite attribute, but I'll also include the cite tag inside the quotation for visual reference. I'd like to use URNs for the citation attribute, but may find it to be a bit difficult to implement at this point since most of our citations are papers. Also, URNs could be problematic since browsers don't currently have URN addressing capabilities.
Even if I stick with URLs, most of the pages on the P2061 site (and elsewhere for that matter) aren't permanently located. I sometimes wonder if I'll ever hit on the right structure. Since we're not likely to implement a CMS anytime soon I'd like to develop some kind of permalink setup using document IDs and a site scanning script that locates the current location of a document. This would allow permanent references.
At some point after I'm done correcting the document title and quotation/citation markup I'll go back and do further research on the quotation/citation question. In the end I'll probably remove the cite tag and use progressive enhancement (read JS) to implement a visual reference.
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