[uf-discuss] Citation: display-first?

[Michael McCracken]

I'd like to get some more momentum going behind the citation process...

I started looking into making a straw proposal of a format, but I
wanted to be sure I kept the previous brainstorming in mind, so I read
back through the wiki pages and as I went, I've been trying some
cleanup on the citation pages. One thing I've noticed a few places is
an assumption that I think seems to go a little counter to how *I*
understand microformats (poorly) - the idea that most possible
displays should be achievable from the same source.

I'm not convinced that that's a problem for the microformat. Instead,
I'd suggest that the major win of having such a format is in discovery
and ease of transferring information from web <-> personal
collections. It seems that in 99% of practice, it is once the
reference is in the personal collections where the display problem is
solved through use of BibTeX styles, EndNote, or emerging open source
initiatives.

Basically, what I'm wondering is: if I'm marking up a citation, why
does it matter if I sometimes need to do something like this:

<a class="title url"
href="http://www.library.yale.edu/scilib/modmodexplain.html">eprint
Moderator Model</a>
<span class="author vcard">
<a href="http://pantheon.yale.edu/~dstern/dsbio.html" class="url
fn">David Stern</a>
</span>

and sometimes this:

<a class="title url"
href="http://www.library.yale.edu/scilib/modmodexplain.html">eprint
Moderator Model</a>
<span class="author vcard">
<a href="http://pantheon.yale.edu/~dstern/dsbio.html" class="url
fn">David Stern</a>
</span>

Because allowing that seems more in step with the humans-first
microformats methodology - we don't need to define a data format that
can represent everything, we *do* need to give people a way to mark up
citations they already produce in a way that provides more structure.

Does anyone think I'm way off base here? I've started a use-case
section on citation-brainstorming, and added my personal axe to grind
- I'm interested to see other takes on what specifically a citation
microformat would be used for.

-mike
--
Michael McCracken
UCSD CSE PhD Candidate
research: http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~mmccrack/
misc: http://michael-mccracken.net/wp/