[uf-discuss] species questions; process: examples questions

[Charles Roper]

On 22/10/06, Benjamin West <bewest at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Perhaps you could be more clear about what it is you want to know.
> ...
> > What do you mean by "authoring practices"?
> ...
> > What do you mean by "the structure of the markup"?
> ...
>
> I don't know how to be any more clear.  I've assumed up until now that
> everyone had a relatively shared meaning of "authoring practices",
> "publishing behaviour", and what structure means in the context of
> markup.  Clearly we don't, so your answers aren't making any sense to
> me.

It seems fairly clear to me what you would like to know. You would
like more analysis on how the straw-man proposal relates to existing
markup practices. Or to put it another way, how does the straw-man
proposal reflect the way people are already marking up their content.

The answer (IMHO) is that it doesn't. The straw-man is based, I
believe, not on existing markup practice but on the ideal way of doing
things (as judged by Andy) based on existing, well founded,
terminology used in biology. In this sense I see it as being similar
to hCard, which is based on an existing, non-HTML, standard rather
than existing markup practice. I don't recall seeing much markup that
looked like current hCard implementations, at any rate. Question
being, is not mirroring existing markup practise a big issue here?

>From my own observations, through working in the field of biodiversity
and as a web designer, there doesn't appear to be much existing common
practice other than that of perhaps marking-up scientific names in
italic (or em) and common names in bold (or strong), or the scientific
name in bold and italic when it is not accompianied by a common name.
Other than that, it would seem to be a bit of a free for all; which is
part of the need for a microformat, of course, as being able to
reliably harvest this information would be incredibly useful.

> I've already expended too much energy on this to further explain, so
> perhaps others can jump in.  Furthermore, by moving my work off the
> page it was meant to be on, I assume you find it tantamount to
> useless, and since there are many other areas my work has been deemed
> useful, I won't be interrupting yours anymore.

It's not useless; far from it. I found your grouping of examples by
publisher to be a very useful way of viewing the content.

Cheers,

Charles