[uf-discuss] Citation: display-first?

[Michael McCracken]

On 3/28/06, Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I agree.

> 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.

What about the advantage that a MF is viewable in a browser? I can ask
people to add a little structure to their markup much easier than I
can ask them to support entire new alternate formats.

Could you explain more about the liabilities of using a MF in RSS that
you refer to?

thanks,
-mike

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