26 July 2003
Rendered irrelevant with backend tweak.I’ve been thinking about quotations and citations lately. Simon Willison’s blockquote citations script is great, and I like using it. The only problem is that the link to the source is given the text ‘source’ , which isn’t particularly helpful.
There was, I seem to recall, some discussion about using the title attribute for this, but the title of a quote is not always going to be the same as the source. Say I’m quoting from The Luzhin Defense: the title will be something like
‘Little Luzhin’s first encounter with chess’
, but the source would be either
‘Vladimir Nabokov’
or
‘The Luzhin Defense’
. So that’s not going to work.
We can embed the source in the blockquote tags, though. The script already does this by manipulating the DOM. I can hear it already: it’s not semantically pure. Perhaps, perhaps not. After all, a citation provides context for a quote, and context is important. Short of wrapping the lot in a container div, this seems to be the best solution.
My version now outputs a citation link if the cite element exists, with that link’s text being the content of a p with a class of
‘cite’
as the blockquote’s last child element; if that doesn’t exist, it’ll be
‘source’
. It’s pretty ugly, but it seems to work. Check it out:
This is a blockquote with a
— Seanciteattribute and some link text.
This is a blockquote with a
— Sourceciteattribute but no link text.
This is a blockquote without a
S.citeattribute but with what would be link text.
This is a blockquote with neither.