Purpose
To present a citation
or reference to other sources, such as a book title.
See notes below.
Typical rendering
In italics. When such rendering is impossible, a browser might use
underlining (Lynx does so) or quotes around the citation.
See general notes on rendering markup.
Basic syntax
<CITE>text</CITE>
Possible attributes
None.
Allowed context
Text container, i.e.
any element that may contain text elements.
This includes most HTML elements. In particular,
text elements can be nested.
Contents
Text elements.
Notice that this disallows e.g. paragraph breaks.
Examples
A simple example, referring to a book by its
title:
Example CITE-1.html:
I learned this from <CITE>The Origin of Species</CITE>.
Notes
On the basic nature of CITE:
There are different opinions and practices on
whether
CITE is to be used for such citations
as titles of books only or for quoting sentences or words in general.
The official documents are laconic: for example,
HTML 3.2 Reference Specification
says that CITE is
"used for citations or references to other sources".
Typically dictionaries say that
citation is roughly synonymous with quotation.
However, the intended interpretation seems to be that CITE is for the
names of external sources (books, articles, documents etc),
not for actual extracts (quotations) from them.
Accepting this, the question arises how quotations are to be presented
within text.
(For quotations to be
presented as separate paragraphs,
or even sequences of paragraphs,
BLOCKQUOTE is the natural choice.)
You can either use quotation marks according to the rules of the
language in which your own document is written, or some other suitable
method, such as italics, i.e. the I element.
The latter is often suitable for very short (e.g. single-word) quotations.
Date of last update:
2010-12-16.