Mark Pilgram is on a tear over discovering that the acronym, cite and q tags have been removed by the W3C from the XHTML^tm 2.0 working draft of 11 December 2002. Specifically he says:

More specifically, the acronym, cite, and q tags are all gone, leaving us, respectively, with abbr, nothing, and nothing. The acronym/abbr thing just means a global search and replace, but the lack of cite and q make my posts by citation and posts by quotation semantically obsolete.

As Bugs Bunny would say, Unlax, Doc. As you pointed out the lack of the acronym tag can be handled with a simple search and replace. Now instead of having two tags that have essentially the same meaning we only have one. The q tag isn’t gone either, its just been replaced with the quote tag so another simple search and replace takes care of that. Now we come to the cite tag which really makes sense to drop, even though you have created a cute tool that takes advantage of its use. Which would you rather have, a cite tag or a cite attribute? Why is there a need for both of them other than to add to confusion?

Still want to revert back to HTML 4.0? Have at it. It’s still a valid standard and one can have semantic markup using it.

AFTERTHOUGHT:
After giving this some thought and reading through that latest draft from the W3C I’m convinced that they are going the right way with the specification. Heck, that cite tag can easily be replaced with a <span class="cite"> tag and everything else they appear to be doing is only more of cleaning up a mess that was in HTML from the get—go. I am a little concerned that a suggestion was made to deprecate the h1 through h6 tags but the note said that was only a suggestion that was made and that the working group hadn’t addressed that yet. I suggest that people let the the working group know about how they feel about this..

One more thing:
The cite attribute’s value is a URI, not a URL. There is a difference. In order to abstract the idea of a generic object, the web needs the concepts of the universal set of objects, and of the universal set of names or addresses of objects. A Universal Resource Identifier (URI) is a member of this universal set of names in registered name spaces and addresses referring to registered protocols or name spaces. A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a form of URI which expresses an address which maps onto an access algorithm using network protocols. So while a URL is going to take you to a resource residing on a computer network a URI could take you anywhere, including a stack in a library to a specific shelf in that stack and point toward a specific book on that shelf telling you a specific paragraph on a specific page. It could also be used to point to a name in a phone book or a university directory to indicate a specific person.

Now that still doesn’t mean that the cite attribute can fully replace the cite tag or element. It won’t but I have suggested a way to acheive the same thing by using something like this: <span class="cite">Source being cited<span>. The span and div elements and the class attribute have more uses than just presentation. Just the fact that something is being presented in a certain way has semantical ramifications. People tend to forget that.

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