[uf-discuss] Citation format straw proposal on the wiki

[Alf Eaton]

On 29 Mar 2006, at 13:29, Michael McCracken wrote:

> On 3/29/06, Alf Eaton <lists at hubmed.org> wrote:
>
>> Either way, here's the kind of thing I had in mind, just for a
>> comparison to your straw man...
>>
>> <div class="bibliography">
>>      <ol class="reference-list">
>>         <li class="citation reference book">
>
> Seeing 'book' here, does this imply that every reference type has a
> separate specific class?

It does, but there aren't that many types. I think it's still easier  
than having a separate type element as in your example below, and  
it's a fairly fundamental piece of information needed in order to be  
able to interpret the citation. It's also an attribute that applies  
to eveything in the contained element, so seems appropriate here.

> I think this might be a slippery slope into a huge format, judging by
> the multitude of types out there in formats like MARC. If we want to
> explicitly encode type, why not something like a type class whose
> content can be whatever type you like? eg:
> <span class="type" style="display:none">book</span>
>
> Condsidering existing practice, citations don't generally say what
> type they are, do they? It's usually implied by the format or kind of
> information they provide. It supports my favorite use case, since I
> want to know what kind of record to create when harvesting references,
> but is it really important, or just an artifact of us being used to
> looking at bibtex etc...?

Yes, they do: BibTeX's @article, for example, as you say. In this  
case, I'm producing the XHTML as a translation from the NLM Journal  
Publishing format, which has 10 defined types for citations and  
'other': http://dtd.nlm.nih.gov/publishing/tag-library/2.1/n-us70.html
OpenURL links also have defined formats for journal articles, books  
and other type of works.

>
>>                 <span class="title">Title of the Article</span>.
>>                 <span class="creator name">Doe J</span> and
>>                 <span class="creator name">Bloggs F</span>.
>>                 <span class="container"> In
>>                         <a class="uri" href="urn:isbn:45346327"/>
>>                         <span class="title">Title of the Book</span>
>>                         (<span class="year">1988</span>);
>>                         <span class="editors">
>>                                 <span class="editor">John Green</ 
>> span> and
>>                                 <span class="editor">Simon Brown</ 
>> span> (Eds);
>>                         </span>
>>                         <span class="publisher">
>>                                 <span class="name">ABC Books</span>,
>>                                 <span class="location">New York</ 
>> span>.
>>                         </span>
>>                 </span>. pp
>>                 <span class="pages">
>>                         <span class="start">33</span>-
>>                         <span class="end">56</span>.
>>                 </span>
>>         </li>
>>      </ol>
>> </div>
>
> for editors and pages, you have a container span, but for authors you
> don't - what are the containers for?

The container is the thing that contains the cited work. In this case  
it's a book; in other cases it could be a journal.
>
>> I guess there are some things in there that could become vcards, if
>> you wanted.
>
> Yeah, it seems like a principle of microformats is to reuse other
> microformats when possible, so publisher and any people ought to be
> vcards, IMHO.

That does make them more weighty though, and harder to read.

alf.