[uf-discuss] citation microformat encodings

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 1/24/06 12:50 PM, "Ed Summers" <ehs at pobox.com> wrote:

> On 1/24/06, C. Hudley <chudley at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I would be interested in your (everyone's!) thoughts on
>> whether those OpenURL-derived examples for book and journal article
>> citations might be useful.  Given that OpenURL is a "well established,
>> interoperably implemented standard we can look at which addresses this
>> problem", I would hope it might draw more interest than it has so far.
> 
> I'm interested in the answer to this as well. I also look forward to
> seeing Brian's ideas fleshed out a bit more on the wiki.
> 
> I must admit to feeling a bit confused about how to proceed. Could
> those of us who are interested in seeing openurl components in a
> microformat create some pages that illustrate how it could be used?
> Would this confuse current efforts or add to them?

The key point missing is this.

Microformats are based FIRST on human publishing *behaviors* on the *web*.

And ONLY THEN do we look at what previous attempts at formats have done to
see if they can help address the problem that has been specified by the
examples documented from the Web.  Existing formats are most useful for the
terms and vocabulary they have chosen.

One point on OpenURL - as far as I can tell, all the information about the
citation is captured in the URL.

The problem is that this is NOT the way people publish citations typically
on the web.

Examples I have seen all have *human visible* text in the page, e.g. the
name of the publication, author, date, maybe publisher etc.  All has text in
the page - not as attributes, nor as part of one big attribute value.

In short, OpenURL is *not* human friendly and does not convey human
*visible* information.  In addition, by its dependency on a specific "link
server" in order to be of any use at all, it does not encourage
*decentralized* development.

However, OpenURL does specify a fairly large vocabulary of
components/properties/terms from which it would be good to consider (along
with other citation format vocabularies) when figuring out what to name the
various properties in a cite microformat.

Thanks,

Tantek