<cite> as part of semantic markup

Question

One of the sites I develop has lots of information linked between each other; we have companies, we have products for those companies. The company page links to the page listing the products for that company, and vice versa.

From the HTML spec:

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

Does this imply that I could (semantically) use a <cite> for a company link? What about on the company page to a product?

If not, could someone tell me what might be the "correct" semantic tag for this?

Answer 1

If you're just linking to other pages then semantically you should just use <a href=...>. If you're quoting a small piece of information, like the information from the HTML spec in your question, and providing a link to the original source, you might use <cite>. Think of it as a citation in a book or research paper.

Answer 2

I'm not sure that cite is intended to mark up links - you may be looking at something akin to a more professional (less inter-personal) XFN using the rel attribute of the link.

Cite is more for marking up titles of articles or other created work.

XFN is specifically for marking up the relationship you (or your company) have with the person or company you are linking to. What I'm not sure of is what xfn values there are (if any) for company links.

http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/xfn

What you might consider is in what detail will the information be used? Semantic markup, although a noble direction to head in, is not yet utilised to it's full extent when looking at (by a human) or parsing (by a program) a resource.