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

[Edward Summers]

On Mar 29, 2006, at 12:29 PM, Michael McCracken wrote:
> In my opinion, converting losslessly is not the aim. Given a
> microformatted citation, I should be able to take one more step and
> find enough information to populate a full format, but I don't think
> embedding a full bibliograhpic record at a citation point really
> follows existing practice. And it might result in a format that is
> huge and hard to understand, inhibiting adoption.

+1

I think it would be a mistake to focus (even briefly) on the holy  
grail of lossless conversion between metadata formats. I like the  
microformat way of focusing on how people have published citation on  
the web, and how to mark them up using (hopefully) familiar and  
reused terminology. It's just that this has proved (at least to me)  
to be a very difficult task.

It's *awesome* to see the strawman proposal on the wiki--it feels  
like we just need a foothold here to get some traction. It's also  
cool to hear Brian and Ryan might be able to build up some consensus  
leading up to XTECH.

This microformat is going to be like a fine wine...I just hope we  
won't have to drive a car into a tree to explain why we look so beat  
up :-)

//Ed