cite element used incorrectly

[holizz]

Here's what the HTML5 specification says about the cite element:

The cite element represents the title of a work (e.g. a book, a paper, an essay, a poem, a score, a song, a script, a film, a TV show, a game, a sculpture, a painting, a theatre production, a play, an opera, a musical, an exhibition, a legal case report, etc). […]

A person's name is not the title of a work — even if people call that person a piece of work — and the element must therefore not be used to mark up people's names. (In some cases, the b element might be appropriate for names; e.g. in a gossip article where the names of famous people are keywords rendered with a different style to draw attention to them. In other cases, if an element is really needed, the span element can be used.)

​http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/text-level-semantics.html#the-cite-element

The element is used plugins/hello.php correctly to mark up the title "Hello, Dolly". But many more places it is used incorrectly to mark up an author's name.

The obvious fix would be to replace all but the one correct instance of the cite element with spans with an appropriate class.

[aaroncampbell]

According to the working draft for HTML5 you are correct about ​cite. However, that's for HTML5 and the WordPress admin doctype is XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Although previous versions of HTML implied that the cite element can be used to mark up the name of a person, that usage is no longer considered conforming.

It seems to me that we're fine until we switch wp-admin to HTML5. I could see possibly fixing the one occurrence of this in twentyeleven, but even then it doesn't seem like this is a bug.

[holizz]

According to the HTML 4.01 spec (XHTML 1.0 doesn't define any elements - it relies on HTML4 for that):

CITE:
Contains a citation or a reference to other sources.

​http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#edef-CITE

I wouldn't consider a person's name to fit that definition, though it's not as specific about names as the HTML5 spec.

And cite does appear several places outside of wp-admin.

[iandstewart]

In [18030]:

Twenty Eleven: using the cite element to markup a name doesn't conform to the HTML spec; Props holizz and aaroncampbell; See #17520

[jakub.tyrcha]

Some of these cite tags were immediately stripped out just after being defined anyway, in other places I double checked with firebug to make sure all styles are maintained

[ocean90]

It's HTML5 time.

[ryan]

Punting enhancements from 3.3.

[desrosj]

Looks like the milestone was removed on this one, so re-adding.

Looks like there are 6 occurrences of <cite> in core itself today and 9 occurrences across 5 default themes.

4 tags are found within wp-admin/includes should be able to get changed without much ripple effect. The <cite> tags within wp_widget_rss_output(), Walker_Comment::comment(), and the default themes will be more difficult because they could cause display issues with themes or child themes for bundled themes.

One way this could be addressed is by using the html5 feature of add_theme_support()/current_theme_supports() to allow theme authors to opt into the switch. I don't love requiring themes to opt-in to the correct behavior, but another backwards compatible approach is not yet coming to mind.

[desrosj]

I only looked at the Core PHP code base above, but it should also be confirmed that Gutenberg uses <cite> correctly.