[uf-discuss] Microformat for dictionary/thesaurus ... + research

[Ryan King]

On Nov 30, 2005, at 12:20 PM, Chris Messina wrote:

> I decided to hack Dictionary.app and see how it worked. It uses a
> stylesheet called DefaultStyle.css with all kinds of markup I've never
> before seen the likes of. For example:
>
> o|ent {
> 	font-family:'Baskerville';font-weight:normal;
> 	font-size:medium;
> 	display: block;
> 	margin: 0em 0em 0em 0em;
> 	margin-left: -13px;
> 	margin-bottom: 1.0em;
> }
>
> It uses this 'o' object a lot and then I checked up on the namespaces
> referenced in the top of the document:
>
> @namespace html url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
> @namespace o url(http://oup.dataformat.com/doc/ 
> OUP_DTD_Dictionary.html);
>
> Apparently you can namespace objects dynamically! ...I had no idea!
>
> Anyway, checking out that page resulted in a format that seemed ripe
> for some dl|dt|dd microformat love:
>
> <entry type="subject" sortkey="sortkeyhere" status="Active"
>                        title="noad:1.01" entry="0" stage="1">
>     <meta> ...  </meta>
>     <hwGrp> ... <hwGrp>
>     <senseBlock>
> 	   <meta> ...  </meta>
> 	   <prelim> ... </prelim>
> 	   <sense>
> 	       <meta> ...  </meta>
> 	       ...
> 	   </sense>
>     </senseBlock>
> </entry>

This could easily be converted 1-to-1 to xoxo + classnames.

> Since much of the work has already been done and there's a decent use
> case for this kind of app, I was wondering if we might be able to take
> the data that's already available and see what a mF could do for it --
> y'know, to be able to offer real world app conversion documentation?
>
> Not only that, but it would be pretty cool to have a mini-web app
> dictionary that you could pull up in Firefox/Flock whose data is
> stored as a simple XHTML file somewhere on the web (hmm, yes, I'm
> hoping to use this in our blog tool!).

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com