[uf-discuss] Citation: display-first?

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On 3/28/06, Michael McCracken <michael.mccracken at gmail.com> wrote:

> If you mean what is different about my example, nothing. I just wanted
> to ask about the problems raised in the 'orignal hBib discussion' -
> where data ordering might be needed to be reworked for display, and my
> question was basically whether that was actually a problem for the
> design of the microformat.

OIC. Yes, I saw that discussion earlier, and I think that particular
goal (of being able to use CSS to style the citations, including
handling reordering) is completely unrealistic. CSS cannot possibly
handle the complexity of citation (re)styling. So this comment from
that document I think is off:

===
There are hundreds of journal-specific formats for presenting
bibliographic data. If CSS cannot transform structured biblographic
information into at least 80% of the presentation format, the
Microformats way fails.
===

If we accept that premise, then we might as well give up now.

For my own use, I see XHTML + MF as only a rich output format, where
the source is more robust formats like DocBook and RDF (and hopefully
in the future OpenDocument). But that static output can itself be
useful.

> A citation microformat would be an excellent choice to use as the
> content of RSS items, however ...

There's already some pretty good solutions out there (CiteUlike and
IngentaConnect come to mind) that use RSS 1.0 (.e.g RDF) for this sort
of thing. I can't possibly imagine that a MF would offer any advantage
over them, and would offer significant liabilities.

Bruce