[uf-new] markup advice for the citation microformat

[Michael McCracken]

Hi Kristin, welcome.

2007/4/20, Kristin Caulfield <kcaulfield at mac.com>:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm very much a newbie to microformats, having had my interest peaked by Dan Cederholm at An Event Apart in Boston in late March. So, I'm sure my question is elementary (I hope not too elementary for this list). I'm working on front end coding for an academic research center's new website that will provide users  with access to all kinds of research publications by its faculty. I looked through the information on the wiki about the citation microformat and would like some feedback concerning whether or not I am heading in the right direction with how I'm coding publication entries for a microformat that is still in development. I would like to do as much work as I can now to mark up these items correctly even though the microformat is still being worked on. Any tips or suggestions ?

The hcite format is pretty slow in development (I think everyone
involved is doing so as a second or third project), but if you are
willing to help pull a little, some experience with trying to use it
in a site like yours would really help move the process along.

My suggestion is to try to use the existing proposed format, find
where there are problems, post them here and help us figure out
solutions.
The existing format is on the citation-brainstorming wiki page here:
http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-brainstorming#Working_straw_schema

There are currently two consumers of hcite-marked-up content that I know of.
You could use them to see if your content is being read as you would like.

The first is Brian Suda's X2C, a web service that uses XSLT to
transform hcite into other formats, currently just bibtex:
http://suda.co.uk/projects/microformats/X2C/

If you use a Mac, you can also use my app, BibDesk, to browse the web
and look for hcite formatted content. Because hcite is not complete,
it's a hidden feature now. I wrote more about that here:
http://michael-mccracken.net/wp/2007/01/26/bibdesk-and-the-hcite-microformat/

If we make changes based on your experience, I'll try to incorporate
those into BibDesk's hcite support as fast as possible.

> Here is some background information on how we will group publications on the site. Our top level categories for publications are: Published papers, working papers, conference papers, seminar papers, books, datasets, and "In the News". It isn't until you get one level down in our categorization scheme that publications will take on standard bibliographic types. For example,  our "In the News" category contains standard types of non-academic work produced by our faculty: Op-ed, book reviews, interviews, magazine articles, newspaper articles, etc.
>
OK

> I'm also a bit fuzzy on how I would use hCard in combination with this microformat for author and publisher. For each publication there would always be at least one faculty member associated with our Center as an author and we will have contact and bio pages for these people that easily lends itself to using hCard.
>

I'm not sure what you're asking here. Hopefully going through the
examples below will help...

> Here are a couple of examples of how I am coding brief summaries for published journal articles and newspaper articles:
>
> <dl class="inthenews">
>         <dt class="title"><a href="res_publicat/pub_papers/summary_pubpapers.htm">Assessing China's Power</a></dt>
>         <dd class="author">by <a href="people/longbio.htm">Joseph S. Nye, Jr.</a></dd>
>         <dd class="publisher">Published by: <cite><a href="http://www.boston.com">The Boston Globe</a></cite></dd>
>         <dd class="description">We examine the empirical role of different explanations for the lack of flows of capital from rich to poor countries&mdash;the &ldquo;Lucas Paradox.&rdquo; The theoretical explanations include differences in fundamentals&hellip;</dd>
>         <dd class="category">Publication Type: Op-Ed</dd>
>         <dd class="date">Publish date: MM/DD/YYYY <a href="res_publicat/pub_papers/summary_inthenews.htm" class="more">More</a>
> </dl>
>
> <dl class="paper">

For hcite, the root element should also have the class 'hcite'.

>         <dt class="title"><a href="res_publicat/pub_papers/summary_pubpapers.htm">Reconciliation as identity change: A social-psychological perspective</a></dt>

title is fine, and if you add class="uri" to the link, it will be
picked up as a link that is an identifier for the citation.

>         <dd class="author">by <a href="people/longbio.htm">Herbert C. Kelman</a></dd>

Here we would have the author represented as an hcard. We've also been
using class="creator" instead of author, to allow for editors, etc.,
without requiring a lot of predefined class names.

Here's what that would look like with a minimal hcard:

      <dd class="vcard creator">by <a class="fn" href="...">Herbert C.
Kelman</a></dd>

(Other µf people, correct me if I'm getting something wrong here.)

>         <dd class="description">This artcle focuses on reconciliation in the context of and in relation to an emerging or recently completed process of conflict resolution.&hellip;</dd>

'description' is fine, an hcite consumer will read that (BibDesk reads
it as the abstract).

>         <dd class="category">Publication Type: Journal article</dd>

This is still up for debate.

>         <dd class="date">Publish date: MM/DD/YYYY <a href="res_publicat/pub_papers/summary_pubpapers.htm" class="more">More</a></dd>

for hcite, we'd mark up the date with class="date-published" and an
abbr element with a machine-readable date abbreviation, like this:

<dd class="date">Publish date: <abbr class="date-published"
title="YYYYMMDD">MM/DD/YYYY</abbr> ...</dd>


Let me know if you have any questions, and if you give these changes a
try, we'd love to hear what experience you have in publishing with
hcite.

> </dl>
>
> Full summaries would also include: Author bio information, the full Chicago Manual of Style formatted citation, and copyright information.
>
> And if the general microformat list is more appropriate, I apologize. Since citation is still an open microformat I came here.

I think this list is fine. It seems like most of the people working on
hCite are also on this list...

>
> Thanks for your help,
> K. Caulfield

Thanks,
-mike

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