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

[Ross Singer]

On 9/25/06, Michael McCracken <michael.mccracken at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
I feel this is a very short-sighted decision, if it's the route hCite
goes...  You'd never be able to link to an appropriate copy (because
you wouldn't be able to determine with any semblance of confidence
what an item actually is) and I'm therefore not sure what the point of
this is.

I guess the way I look at it is this: the entire point of formatting a
citation in a standardized way is so that another scholar can then go
in and know how to find the item again to follow the first person's
research.  If the second scholar's /browser/ can do this work, the way
that it looks on the screen is rather insignificant (much to the
chagrin on the MLA and the APA, but they'll probably be happier in the
long run).

I've gone on record repeatedly that I don't care if hCite looks like
OpenURL as long as it's easy to make something remotely OpenURL from
it, but this is a fairly vital part of OpenURL... the very basic
notion of knowing what something is.  I would recommend that we at
least use the basic the journal (journal, article, issue, proceeding,
conference, preprint), book (bookitem, book, proceeding, conference,
report), dissertation (or thesis), or patent that are currently
defined under the San Antonio profile in OpenURL (and it's actually
trivial to add other formats if necessary -- yes, that's an open
invitation to you, Bruce ;)).  No, you don't have to use these labels,
but if you want to get the darn thing, choose something that we can
map to.

Because static, non-actionable lists are so last web trend.

-Ross.