What is the cite attribute for?

Question

The cite attribute specifies the address of the source of the quoted text, I think, but who uses this information?

For example:

Answer 1

It is meant to be used by machine which collect and arrange data eg. search engines, but it can be used by any machine. It is meant to make webpages more systematic to be read by machine. As they can not understand which part of text represent citation and quote based on only context. you can look up Semantic Web for more information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web