[uf-discuss] Book Contents Format

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 6/21/06 2:33 PM, "Scott Reynen" <scott at randomchaos.com> wrote:

> On Jun 21, 2006, at 4:24 PM, Alex Ezell wrote:
> 
>> That is, this is not to describe something like the Table of Contents,
>> but actually structure each chapter or section or what have you. It
>> seems that Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders may be
>> the leading edge on this front, but I thought that the microformatters
>> would be a good place to start as well.
>> 
>> I checked the wiki and the info was sparse, so I thought the mailing
>> list readers might have more info tucked away on blogs somewhere.
> 
> I assume you've seen these pages:
> 
> http://microformats.org/wiki/book-brainstorming
> http://microformats.org/wiki/book-examples
> http://microformats.org/wiki/book-formats
> 
> I suspect the wiki is sparse because there aren't many real world
> examples from which to draw semantics.  There are two examples on the
> examples page and one points to bibliography markup for a plain-text
> book (as I believe all Project Gutenberg books are).  So that leaves
> us with only one example from which to draw semantics

That's not quite accurate.  You can't dismiss the Project Gutenberg books
because although they don't use angle brackets, their use of standardized
whitespace and punctuation to represent various book semantics is a markup
format of sorts and thus still quite useful from a implied schema research
perspective.

> prompting the  
> question: is there really a need for such a microformat?

It's an interesting question, especially since a particular proposed book
microformat (boom!) has been used to actually markup and *publish* a real
physical book.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/boom

Back when Håkon started working on "boom", I gave him a bit of leeway, for
various reasons:

<http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2006-January/0028
70.html>

Suffice it to say that much of the microformats principles and process I
have derived and designed from what I learned from Håkon. His instincts tend
to be quite good.  That said, I am still asking Håkon to go through the
process with research of pre-existing formats, and naming of class names to
reuse and take advantage of existing formats.

Thanks,

Tantek