[uf-discuss] Show Microformat Brainstorming

[Bill Humphries]

On Dec 6, 2005, at 1:27 AM, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:

> Thought I'd do some thinking out load about possibilities for a show
> microformat.
>
> What is a show?  Think TV show.  Although it doesn't have to be a  
> TV show.

When you mentioned that, I had an orthogonal conception of the problem.

Consider the case of the person writing about their favorite show,  
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in their blog. Bloggers and Whedon: two  
things that go together, eh?

 > Last night's Buffy episode was silly.

I'd like to find all the shows my friends are watching/writing about,  
so I can build things from it, or tell tools "go and buy these  
episodes of these shows from the Apricot You Tunes Music Store."

Now there's not an existing XML format to my knowledge for us to work  
from. So I have to make some assumptions.

1. This is a recurring TV series our blogger's writing about.
2. It's in its N season.
3. This is episode X of the current season.

Observing fan and academic writers online, I often see them refer to  
episodes of a TV show using:

BtVS 1.12 "Prophesy Girl"

That is: Episode twelve of season one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,  
entitled "Prophesy Girl".

Okay:

<cite>BtVS1.12 "Prophesy Girl"</cite>

Feh, it tells me it a cite, but there's only unicode inside.

Better:

<cite class="htv">BtVS 1.12 "Prophesy Girl"</cite>

Okay, it's a show using the htv µ format.

Ah:

<cite class="htv"><span class="series"><abbr title="Buffy the Vampire  
Slayer">BtVS</abbr></span> <span class="season">1</span>.<span  
class="episode">12</span> <span class="title">Prophesy Girl</span></ 
cite>

in the CSS we'll throw in a rule to put quotes around the episode title.

So what do we have so far:

htv
	series, required	name of series
		name of series
		or 	abbr with title attribute set to name of series
	season, optional	number indicating season
		episode, optional	number indicating order of airing
		[ headaches when we talk about Firefly that has a different  
canonical order than the airing order ]
	title, optional		title of episode

I'll run this past some media fan and academic friends to get their  
impression.

If there's interest, I'll write it up for the bestiary.

-- Bill 'whump' Humphries | http://www.whump.com/