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

[Tim White]

--- "C. Hudley" <chudley at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 3/30/06, Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 3/30/06, Tim White <tjameswhite at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Although, to clarify, your distinction above is really between an
> > in-text citation, and a full bibliographic reference.


I had that same thought on my drive yesterday...


> Um... I just see it as a note pointing to a citation and the citation
> itself.  That fuller citation is still just an external reference,
> not
> a full bibliographic record.  i.e. you still don't want price,
> keywords, etc., or even need the ISBN, technically.  He's talking
> about the book as external to the content at hand, which is his blog
> entry... it's not the book itself.
> 


Certainly it could be.


I had four hours of driving last night to think about things and I
think part of our problem is the word "citation." I'll own up to
mis-using it to mean simple inline notation as well as full work
cited-style entries. 

Perhaps my history of why I'm involved in this would help? I've always
hated that there isn't a good way of representing titles of works in
html. <cite> is limited, so I started toying with the idea of adding
classes ("book", "poem", "movie") and then using css to style them
according to MLA.

Microformats crossed my radar and other people expressed similar
interests. So, out of a simple way to note books, etc. comes the
citation format.

What I like with MFs is that we should be able to collapse a full
citation down to a simple inline reference.

We've been struggling with getting anything going on this front because
a full citation can be very very complex. Believe me I know -- I worked
on a project to convert hundreds of thousands of citations into a
proper SGML format. We went back and forth on how much granularity to
have.

My thought is, let's start simple. Let's get a working draft that
encompasses, for example, title, author, publisher. Let's get people
using it, get feedback, then start adding more granular information to
it. This shouldn't be too difficult since 2/3 is hcard (+ date-time
design pattern for pub dates).

Look at hresume. Ryan got a working draft out there and some of us have
started using it. Feedback has been logged on what's working and what
isn't. 




~ Tim

<a href="http://www.tjameswhite.com">www.tjameswhite.com</a>

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