[uf-discuss] [hCite] call for examples: language

[Michael McCracken]

On 1/31/07, Brian Suda <brian.suda at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/31/07, Michael McCracken <michael.mccracken at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'd like to hear some discussion on the language field for hCite.
> > I think it is useful, but it has two things going against it for me:
> >
> > - many citation formats have supported useful work without storing the language
> > (I've never had 'language' in a bibtex entry, nor seen it written in a
> > list of references - even when it is obviously not the same language
> > as the referring page/paper.)
> >
> > - We only have two examples of pages marking up the language on the
> > web - W3C and Amazon.com.
> >
> > The second point is why I'm writing this - I am happy to admit that
> > it's useful to be able to mark up the language, and I'd have no
> > problem with 'language' as an optional field in hCite, but if there
> > are no other examples to be found, that suggests to me that maybe it's
> > not really necessary.
> >
> > I'm open to the thought that Amazon alone is enough examples, because
> > of its size, but I'm not totally sold on that.
> >
> > So - if you feel that hCite needs a language field, please find
> > relevant examples from the web and add them to the wiki, then point to
> > them in this thread.
>
>
> --- HTML gives us a mechanism for determining the language. the @lang
> attribute or @xml:lang. Both of these are in use already with hCard
> and hCalendar. It would make sense to simply extend them to hCite as
> well.
>

If we use @lang, doesn't that mean we're specifying the language of
the words in the hCite element, but not necessarily the language of
the thing we're citing?

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