[uf-discuss] Easy book citations

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On 7/30/06, Tantek Çelik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:

> On 7/30/06 7:59 AM, "Fred Stutzman" <fred at metalab.unc.edu> wrote:
>
> > I think microformat citations are a great idea.
>
> Hi Fred and thanks!
>
>
> > The good news is the hard
> > work has already been done for us.
> >
> > The .bib citation format is a flexible, open, and widely used bibliographic
> > format.
>
> <snip>
>
> > I believe our task could be as simple as microformatting the bib format.
>
> If the bib format was the overwhelmingly dominant bibliographic/citation
> format, it could be that simple.  But it is not.  It is one of many formats
> in wide use.

Correct, and it frustrates me to no end whenever some BibTeX user pops
up and says this. It's just not true. Moreover, it's just a bad model.

> The last time the "which format is newest / most widely in use / most
> interoperable" questions were asked, I believe OpenURL was the answer.  I
> could be mistaken, I've only been on the periphery of the citation
> microformat work and there are several others here who are much more
> familiar with the state of the work.

I think the place where we were heading -- we meaning collective
consensus informed by tons of research and practical implementation
experience -- is some standard properties like:

contributors (reusing hcard for the markup)
====================================
author
editor
translator
publisher

dates
=====
date
accessed

locator numbers
=======
volume
issue
document
page

titles
====
title
short-title
translated-title

I've long been arguing we need some relational -- dcterms:isPartOf
like -- structure, but in my more recent work on my citation style
language (and a few different software implementations of it,
includiing one a guy is writng in Javascript for a forthcoming Firefox
extension *), I've come to the conclusion tha the only critical
structures that need some relational sugar are titles. Allowing <span
class="title series">Series Title</span> keeps things simple while
allowing a lot of flexibilty.

It would also make sense to allow them on contributors, so that you
easily get series editors and such.

Bruce

* <http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/archives/2006/07/29/csl-progress>