citation issues was: process, [citation] (was Re: [uf-new] announcing the hOCR and hBIB microformats)

[Tom]

Thanks for the response

> Instead, I'm re-organizing them as issues,

I don't understand.  Are you asserting that my requirements are  
"issues" in the standard software engineering sense (http:// 
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue_%28computers%29 and http:// 
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirement, or are you simply using different  
terminology?

> In order to
> support the assertions, eg the importance of preserving the typeface
> of the original citation, you'll need to provide examples from the  
> web.
> (FWIW, html does not make any promises to preserve the presentation
> of a resource by design, so I doubt this will really be a  
> requirement here.)

As should have been clear from my comments, I'm not talking about  
"preserving presentation" or "typefaces" in HTML.  I don't primarily  
care about what the citations look like on the web; it would be nice  
if they looked right, but that's secondary. I care about what  
citations look like in published papers, and citations in published  
papers can contain mathematics, chemical formulas, and other  
typographic phenomena.  Citations in published papers also have a  
complex ontology: what fields need to be present in what kinds of  
publications, how they are represented, etc.

Consider the citation records for my publications.  Right now, users  
see a citation on the web, then they need to click on a separate link  
to get the BibTeX or Endnote citation, and then incorporate that into  
their bibliography manager.   What a citation microformat should  
achieve is that people can simply use the information embedded in the  
HTML to accomplish the same thing.  That's what other microformats  
like hCard achieve.

What does that mean for a citation microformat?  It means that I put  
my BibTeX or Endnote citations into some web citation system, which  
converts it into a microformat.  A user then uses Operator or selects  
the HTML and puts it into their citation manager.  That user should  
obtain an exact representation of my BibTeX or Endnote citation,  
without manual editing and without losing formatting relative to the  
original BibTeX or Endnote entry.

I think at this point you have to support your assertion that the  
"strawman" citation microformat on the Wiki satisfies my  
requirements; alternatively, you can argue that my requirement is  
either unfulfillable or not important, or that you just don't want to  
debate the issue and I should go away (in which case, we'll simply  
continue independently or push for DC adoption).

> and I'll let those more familiar
> with this work comment further.  In addition, I'm going to scan  
> through the
> citation documents and move anything that can easily be rephrased  
> as an issue
> to the issues page.  Hopefully have them concentrated in one place
> will help, and people won't mind me moving things around too much.

Well, I have pretty much said what I have to say.   I urge you to  
consider my arguments carefully.  I'll be happy to answer specific  
questions or to respond to specific arguments.

Thomas.