Observations with using hCitation for Art (was Re: [uf-discuss] Visual Art Titles Microformat Proposal)

[Brian Suda]

On 10/22/06, Jeremy Boggs <jeremyboggs at gmail.com> wrote:
> One issue that comes up: When citing art, the life span of the
> creator is given. I notice that vCard/hCard does not have a way to
> mark up date of death, but does have date of birth. Are there
> thoughts on how to account for this? I've used DATEOFDEATH to show
> everyone where the date of death is relative to the rest of the
> markup, but I know this isn't standard.

there was a long thread about it last April, you can read through the archives:
http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2006-April/003703.html

i don't think much was agreed upon, but ideas were certainly floated.

The way i quickly find things in the archives is by using Google's
SITE: search parameter.

"site:microformats.org/discuss/ death day"

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=is-is&q=site:microformats.org/discuss+death+day&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

You might want to try searching for other things like "date of death"
ect. That discussion might have spanned a few threads?

> Second issue: In this example, the date of painting is uncertain,
> hence the "circa" 1800/1815 (between 1800 and 1815.) To compensate, I
> use DURATION as suggested in a different thread by Brian Suda, to
> define a period of time of 15 years.[3] As Brian mentions in that
> thread, DURATION is not widely supported by parsers, but I believe it
> has potential for a lot of uses, including this case. Any thoughts on/
> concerns with my use of DURATION in this particular instance?

Do paintings have a published range? i thought you could only PUBLISH
it once. I can see books being republished, but then we increment the
EDITION. dtpublished changes for second edition.

In your case you are actually asking for a fuzzy precision, like this
photo was taken "last week" or "last year". At the moment there is no
way to indicate this very well, and i'm not sure DURATION is the exact
semantics you would be looking for this this situation, although i
don't have anything more to offer.

> Third issue, for the measures folks: I gave the painting two
> measures: one for centimeters, one for inches. I put each of these in
> its own div to make sure that 73.7 refers to HEIGHT in inches (and 29
> refers to HEIGHT in centimeters), but this may be incorrect/
> unnecessary. Thoughts on this?

The other source of inspiration is "What are consuming apps doing?"
are they looking for a string "73.7 cm" or are they looking for some
sort of object, "int for length" 73.7,"type of dimention" height,
"enum for unit" cm? If that is the case, then each should be
explicitly marked-up, if not, then a string is fine and you don't need
to deal with UNITS explicitly. It kinda goes back to the question of
"Are we solving an existing problem, or are creating a problem to be
solved?"

-brian

-- 
brian suda
http://suda.co.uk