[uf-discuss] Citation: next steps?

[Bruce D'Arcus]

Mike,

On 8/29/06, Michael McCracken <michael.mccracken at gmail.com> wrote:

> Do you just mean the ability to mark up a relation between two citation items?
>
> For instance, if BibTeX had a convention of things like this:
>
> @inbook{chapterkey,
> title="chapter 1",
> cites="articlekey,article2key,...",
> partof="bookkey"}

[... snip ...]

> Would you consider that relational? That kind of thing fulfills what I
> think you want, but I'd like to know if you're talking about something
> else too.

Yes, I'd frankly forgotten about macros, but they achieve the same
thing I am after.

I was more referring to the standard BibTeX fields, where you end up
with stuff like:

    journal="ABC Journal"

...or:

    book="Book Title"

This is what I object to as a basis for hCite. It effectively means
that whenever you need to support a new kind of resource, you need to
invent a new field name to describe the same thing: a related title.

> ISTR that you've also described BibTeX's model as flat because author
> names in BibTeX are somewhat underspecified, but since a citation
> microformat will use hCard, that's not an issue here, right?

Right. I think hCard is nice improvement on the BibTeX contributor
representation.

In terms of "modular" I am referring to the fact that there is very
little that is specific to citation metadata. Properties like title,
subject, format, etc. can be used to describe a whole range of content
beyond citations.

It therefore seems to be more sensible -- both generally, as well as
WRT to microformat practice -- to isolate the general pieces and give
them a name (like, for example, hDC), and end up with an hCite format
that mostly borrows from those more general formats (hDC, hCard, and
maybe hCal).

But this is less of a concern for me. It wouldn't be the end of the
world for others to borrow from hCite.

Bruce