One of the (apparently) little-known attributes of HTML’s blockquote element is the cite attribute:
- cite = uri [CT]
- The value of this attribute is a URI that designates a source document or message. This attribute is intended to give information about the source from which the quotation was borrowed.
I’ve used it for quite a while here and recently added an XHTML-compatible version of Dunstan Orchard’s citation extractor that makes the information stored there actually useful. Unfortunately, few of the blog crawlers (notably Technorati, if only for the connotation of its name) recognize that the cite attributes are links just as much as href attributes are. I’d always wondered why my links never showed up in the cosmos for articles I’d commented on, and now I guess I know.
