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A citation is a reference to something someone said or wrote, typically a published work of some kind, these days often on the web.

Publishing a citation for material discussed in a article, or that a reply is in-reply-to, are also ways of explicitly and transparently giving-credit to sources.


Main article: h-cite

When publishing references to published works on the web, use the h-cite microformat to markup the name of the work, URL, author (with embedded h-card name, photo, and URL ), when published, publisher (if any), when retrieved (optionally).

IndieWeb Uses

There are several specific indieweb uses of citations.

  • reply-context - a reply-context contains a citation for the original post that the reply is in-reply-to.
  • comments-display - indieweb comments that have been syndicated from their original reply URLs into a "Comments" section on an original post are all references to original material, and thus are also citations.
  • post footer sections - external references in footer sections (i.e. in addition to the abovementioned comments display section) are almost always also citations.

User Interface

text input

A site can provide text inputs with a citation URL (and/or full citation markup) pre-filled in for the reader to copy / paste. IndieWeb Examples:

Silo examples:

append to text selection copy

Using javascript it appears possible to append a citation URL to the end of any text that a reader selects and uses the "copy" operation on.

Possible source of script to do this:

Criticism. There have been some sites / script that in addition to adding the citation URL also do some sort of tracking of every copy action. This has been written up with some criticism:

Thus if you do choose to implement an approach that adds a citation URL automatically to text that is copied from your posts, be respectful of your readers, and avoid any (especially surreptitious) tracking.

allow access to fragmention on copying text

Main article: fragmentioner

Using javascript, it is possible to provide access to the fragmention for a selected text. Preliminary demo:


Why a URL UI when address bar has it

Q: Why provide a UI to copy/paste the URL of the post (e.g. a text input box pre-filled with the permalink), when the user can just copy/paste the URL from the browser address bar?

A: Browser UIs sometimes do not provide an (easily) accessible the address bar, e.g.:

  • mobile browsers (often hide the URL bar, make it hard to get to)
  • kiosks, kiosk mode, fullscreen mode, presentation mode

A2: It's also easier for the user, having just finished reading your post, to see the UI immediately in their reading flow, and not having to scan back up to the top of the window for it.

See Also