[uf-discuss] Easy book citations

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On 7/30/06, Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've done enough work on this stuff -- and worked with other
> developers; people like Chris Putnam on his excellent bibutils
> converion tools -- to tell you that it's pretty easy to design a a
> good format that will be easy to use, extend, and process. Nothing
> "blue sky" about it. And it won't be hard to convert into and out of
> BibTeX either (except, of course, where BibTeX's limited data
> structure gets in the way).

Just to illustrate, a simple book encoding may have these properties:

author
editor
translator
publilsher
title
date
uid (for isbns and such)

The first four reuse hCard.

All of those properties (except, I guess, uid, author, and translator)
could also include an additional class attribute to be able to capture
things like series editors and titles; e.g.:

    <span class="series title">Series Title</span>

Is there really any reason why that would be a problem?  It's simple,
it's easy to convert to BibTeX and other formats, and it's flexible.

Bruce