[uf-discuss] hCite progress

[Jeremy Boggs]

On Nov 14, 2006, at 7:59 PM, Scott Reynen wrote:

>> Does the "it's" to which you're referring, Scott, mean hCite for a  
>> reviewed book in general, or marking up page numbers specifically?
>
> Neither.  I was referring only to page count (which is different  
> than page numbers).

Good catch; I meant "page count," but didn't actually type that,  
there and a few other places in my email. My bad.

> Yes.  Nearly every type of microformat published in the wild  
> contains content that isn't part of the microformat's purpose.   
> Parsers just ignore this unrelated content.  But it can still be  
> intermingled in the HTML.

Awesome, thanks!

>> My understanding of why page counts exist in book review  
>> bibliographic information is that it is a legacy from older  
>> problems with knowing which book is the "right" book, or the book  
>> your referring to; I might refer to a version that has, say, 438  
>> pages, but there might be another print run that had, for various  
>> reasons, 420 pages. This is so much a problem anymore, so maybe it  
>> isn't a problem for hCite.
>
> If that were a common problem I think it would be a compelling  
> reason to include page counts.  But if it's just an edge case,  
> hCite can still be useful to the 80% (or more) cases where page  
> count is irrelevant, and people can still read the page count where  
> it's relevant even if machines can't.

This makes sense. I don't think it is anymore, especially with the  
prominence of editions and versions of printed works. From my  
understanding, keeping page counts has been simply a legacy of that  
problem. It might also serve a purpose for book stores trying to  
determine how much shelf space they need for certain books, but this  
is merely speculation on my part. In any case, neither is really a  
good argument for including page counts in hCite.

>> Is there a reason why hCite could not be used in a book review  
>> marked up in hReview?
>
> I don't see any.  You have to cite a book before you can review it,  
> right?

Quite true; you do have to include the bibliographic information  
before you can review it, at least in a standard academic review. I  
guess, then, that we should at some point add hCitation to the review  
wiki page.

I do think that, if we decide that this is out of the scope of hCite,  
it would be good to include on the wiki somewhere some explanation of  
why certain bibliographic/citation elements are left out of hCite.  
Especially for folks who regularly write out references and citations  
and are just picking up on microformats; folks like me:)

Best,
Jeremy