How widely supported is the "<cite>" tag?

Are there any points to be aware, or wary, of when using it?

--
Andy Mabbett
"The Internet is a reflection of our society[ ...]. If we do not like what we
see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix
society." Vint Cerf

Andy Mabbett <usenet200309@pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote in message news:<DxkXVUAgZx2AFw4u@pigsonthewing.org.uk>...
It should be supported everywhere. I'm unaware of any way in which
it's not supported, by any HTML user agent.

It doesn't have any specific action associated with it. It's merely a
container - you might as well use a <span>, except that <cite> has a
little implied semantics to it. As a piece of basic raw HTML, basic
compliance for any user agent says that is should render unknown
elements as their text content, which is reasonable behaviour for
<cite>. As slightly more advanced behaviour, it's just a peg to hang
CSS on, and any half-decent CSS-aware user agent ought to manage that.

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, Andy Dingley wrote:

Well, hang on, let's draw a comparison. WinIE doesn't support <abbr>,
in the sense that if styling, or title attribute, is applied to it,
the normal behaviour that would be expected in response to such
styling, or title attribute, is absent. I'd call that a "lack of
support", wouldn't you?

So the question whether <cite> is supported in that sense seems to me
an entirely valid one. Off-hand I'm not aware of browsers which fail
to support it in that sense, but the broad-brush assertion that it
"should be supported everywhere" seems to me to miss the point of the
question. My reason for "should be supported everywhere" is that it
was already in HTML at HTML/2.0 and so browsers "should" have got
around to implementing it by now. Which is rather different from the
reason that you're giving.

HTML doesn't normally have "actions", as you well know. But
/browsers/ do have, in response to the HTML. If those expected
actions (rendering of the styling, display of title attribute etc.)
are absent for the element <foo...> whereas they would have been
present for the element <span...>, I'd tend to designate that as lack
of support for "foo", wouldn't you?

No disagreement there. However, <cite> is not exactly a new HTML
construct, I don't see any excuse for treating it as unknown.

I think it's conventional to render it in an italic font by default.
See e.g http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1#appendix-a

And of course there could be some way of presenting its title
attribute.

Can you name a "half-decent" user agent ;-} in that sense?

Last time I looked, browsers did what you said before - if they didn't
know the element, they ignored the tags and any attributes, and
rendered the content as if the tags had not been there. They didn't
apply style, title, or any other attributes.

cheers