[uf-discuss] Easy book citations

[Brian Suda]

I do have some spare cycles (not many), but i'm always up for a
challenge, August 30 is acceptable.

<p class="shameless-plug">
I have to prep some for my talk at EuroOSCON in september, hopefully i
can add some citation stuff in there as well. If anyone else will be
attended feel free to say hello in person.
</p>

<p class="shameless-plug">
The other thing that is keeping very busy is that i am putting some
final touches on a "Introduction to Microformats" eBook for O'Reilly,
which is due in a few weeks. It is part of their "shortcuts" series
and i'll post a link once it is available.
</p>

A few of the other things to clarify and point out from where we left
off and to bring people up to speed.

1) The list of properties available in the straw proposal may look
long and unweildy, but that is just a FRACTION of what was available.
It may not seem like we "started simple" but if you knew what is out
there, you'd realise that we did!

The way we arrived at those properties are as follows: We examined
several of the most popular formats, and took the UNION of their
common terms. We then examined examples in the wild and then took a
UNION of those terms and the common terms of the formats to arrive at
the short list in the strawman.

2) Much like hCard, you don't have to use the FULL microformat. hCard
has options for ORG, ADR, etc. If you wanted to just represent a
structured name, there is no need to create a microformat, just use
the parts of hCard you need. This citation microformat will be
similar. If you want to JUST have a book title, then this format will
sufice, it is just like any of the other microformats, beyond the
required properties, everything is optional!

3) One of the other things we wanted to "look out" for was the
emergence of the media-info format. There has been some movement on
that. We wanted to be sure that the way a citation describes a
book/CD/DVD is not incompatable to that of a media-info format.

Arguing end-user formats, i think, it is moot. Once we have a solid
citation microformat that covers the 80/20 of the common terms within
the citation formats AND citations in the wild, you will be able to
transform that HTML into BibTeX, COiNS, OpenURL, MS Word ODF Citation,
CSV, or any that pop-up in the future - you can even style it in
Plain-Text as MLA, Chicago Style, or any other.

I'll do some homework and get caught-up with all the developments
since our last major  discussion.

-brian

On 7/30/06, Edward Summers <ehs at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Jul 30, 2006, at 2:08 PM, Tantek Çelik wrote:
> > What if we set a goal for hCite 0.1 of August 30?  Is that reasonable?
>
> If Brian Suda has the spare cycles I think this is an excellent idea.
> The citation effort has gone on for a long time, so Simon's questions
> are most welcome.
>
> //Ed_______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss at microformats.org
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>


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