Dive Into Mark: Semantic Obsolescence. Mark is pissed about the removal of the cite tag from XHTML 2.0 and, frankly, so am I. However, bear in mind that XHTML 2.0 is still a working draft, so there’s still time for cite to be added back in. Mark isn’t the only one who noticed this change, as a December 12 posting to www-html-editor shows. Sadly, nobody from the W3C has bothered to reply to that post, which might either mean that there isn’t a reasonable justification for the removal of cite or that none of the “powers that be” read www-html-editor.

As for the removal of the q tag, that appears to be replaced with the quote tag. Although that change removes backward compatibility for inline quotes, renaming the tag removes ambiguity. The q tag probably should have been called quote to begin with. Who knows why they decided to change it now.

I can understand Mark’s disappointment. Like Mark, I’ve been trying to keep on top of the W3C’s standards and have been following their semantic markup recommendations to make my pages easier to work with. Hopefully they will be able to redeem themselves before XHTML 2.0 becomes a recommendation.