[uf-discuss] [citation]: Brian's outstanding issues 2:

[Michael McCracken]

On 9/25/06, Scott Reynen <scott at randomchaos.com> wrote:
> On Sep 25, 2006, at 7:35 PM, Michael McCracken wrote:
>
> > I know what you mean - the type matters in how you format the
> > reference, but it isn't usually displayed. This is something we'll
> > have to hammer out. Right now it looks like a tradeoff between
> > flexibility and elegance, but I'm hoping for a solution that combines
> > both...
>
> I'd lean towards what's currently published.  If the microformat
> requires publishers to display more than they are displaying
> currently, they'll likely either not use it, or use it with some ugly
> content-hiding hack.

I agree - as I've said before we shouldn't *require* any kind of type
information, because human users don't really need them, and (at least
for applications I'm most familiar with) programs consuming the format
likely have a good fallback type to use when the type isn't obvious.

The question is how to allow publishers who wish to include the type
to do it in the best way. The separate type element seems to be the
lesser of two evils in this case.

The option of just ignoring types altogether - not including a type
property at all - is certainly possible - it would make human-reading
and publishing easier but automatic parsing somewhat harder. This
might be a worthwhile tradeoff.

-mike

-- 
Michael McCracken
UCSD CSE PhD Candidate
research: http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~mmccrack/
misc: http://michael-mccracken.net/wp/