[uf-discuss] Citation: next steps?

[Brian Suda]

Hello Mike, thanks for bringing this up.

I spent a good portion of the weekend looking at my earlier straw
proposal. I started to create an XMDP file and took the examples
listed on the wiki and attempted to mark them-up with the citation
microformat. This would help to find any deficiencies.

The 3 main points i came across so far are:
1) IDENTIFIERS
2) FORMAT TYPES
3) NESTING

1) In hCard/hCalendar there is a UID field. Added with URL it makes
for a great unique identifier. There are loads of other identifers
besides URL, ISBN, LOC call number, SKU, ISSN, etc. Many of these are
unique in their domain, but not globally unique. So how to they get
marked-up? Much like the hCard TEL/ADR properties, we can use
something like:
<div class="uid"><span class="type">ISBN</span>: <span
class="value">123456</span></div>
This makes the encoding the most extensible... if we start use
class="isbn" then it is an enumerated list, with class="type" it is
open ended.

2) I keep mis-using "format", format is the medium - hardback,
softback. The TYPE (there probably is a better word - container?) is
book, article, conference, manifesto, etc. Much like the identifers we
can make an enumerated list of values, class="book", class="article",
but that boxes us in, whereas something like: <span
class="type">article</span> leaves things more open.

3) Nesting citation data in a citation. The ability to nest the same
microformat inside itself is something that other microformats don't
explicitly handle.

The two options are:
i) Using class="book"
<div class="hcite">
  <div class="book">
   <span class="fn">Book Title</span>
   <div class="chapter">
      <span class="fn">Chapter Title</span>
   </div>
  </div>
</div>

This makes things easy to nest and to figure out exactly what is
associated with what, but the downside is that we have enumerated
lists of values for the class properties.

ii) using the TYPE for book
<div class="hcite">
  <div class="type">book</div>
  <span class="fn">Book Title</span>
  <div class="type">chapter</div>
  <span class="fn">Chapter Title</span>
</div>

now the class="fn" is not nested inside the class="book" or
class="chapter" so there would have to be some other mechanism to
associate the data with the type.

This is just a brief summary of the outstanding issues. I have been
quite busy with other things, and i'm not sure exactly how or where to
proceed? I have a feeling the citation discussion is pretty heavy and
i don't want to waste people's time with all the back and forth
messages on the mailing list - it is high traffic enough already...
the wiki is nice, but not everyone keeps a close eye on it... IRC is
another option. We've done 'meet-ups' in the past and they worked
fairly well? so i'll leave it up to others on where/how we should
proceed. maybe like the REST mailing list we need to spin off a
temporary citations mailing list? (although that means YAML, Yet
Another Mailing List)

I am still working on exactly WHAT we are proceeding on. I'll be
offline for the next few days due to traveling, so a deadline of the
30th is probably not realistic. I am certainly open to suggestions.

-brian

On 8/29/06, Michael McCracken <michael.mccracken at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, aside from adding a few good examples of existing formats, it
> looks like there hasn't been any movement toward the Aug 30 deadline
> for hCite 0.1. Should we reschedule the goal?
>
> Also, what is the immediate next step on the path to a recommendation?
> Do we need to clarify the existing research on the wiki? Is anyone
> waiting for an answer or agreement before moving forward?
>
> Thanks,
> -mike
>
> --
> Michael McCracken
> UCSD CSE PhD Candidate
> research: http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~mmccrack/
> misc: http://michael-mccracken.net/wp/
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>


-- 
brian suda
http://suda.co.uk