[uf-discuss] hCite elevator pitch and my bibliography generator

[Paul Wilkins]

Henri Sivonen wrote:

> I needed a .bib-based bibliography generator for XHTML, so I wrote  
> one with help from a friend who had developed a .bib parser. The  
> output of my generator can be seen at
> http://hsivonen.iki.fi/thesis/html5-conformance-checker.xhtml#references
>
> I've wrapped the values of .bib fields in elements whose class name  
> is the .bib field name. I did it just in case. I don't have any  
> consumer use case for those class names. It was just super-easy to  
> generate them.
>
> My use case (publishing an academic paper with a bibliography) is not  
> mentioned as a use case at
> http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-brainstorming . More to the  
> point, the wiki has no consumer use case for my publication use case.
>
> Does this mean that hCite is not for me at all?


Not at all. You are using the BibTex format, which is covered in the 
citation formats http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-formats

> If hCite is for me, what's the elevator pitch convincing me to put  
> more effort into my generator? What benefits should I expect if I do?  
> Is hCite mature enough to be implemented yet?


The citation microformat is a work in progress at this stage, so it's 
not mature enough for programs to extract information from it, yet 
examples of current use are being asked for at 
http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-examples so that most popular uses 
will be catered for.

The benefits are that people visitng your content with next generation 
tools wil be able to easily extract and use the information in more 
interesting and useful ways.
Tantek has a recent presentation about the big picture of microformats 
at http://tantek.com/presentations/2007/02/microformats/

> Moreover, is it even possible to generate hCite from my source data  
> (http://hsivonen.iki.fi/thesis/dippa.bib) without sacrificing the  
> presentation that I want and without potentially generating bogus  
> markup for personal names?


One of the big ideas behind the use of microformats is that it will 
allow you to markup the content on your page without modifying the 
presentation of it.

> For example, my source data does not  encode explicitly the given 
> name, the family name and other stuff  that isn't quite neither. As 
> far as I can tell, it is impossible to  tell heuristically that the 
> middle token in these two names is  semantically different:
> Gavin Thomas Nicol
> Henrik Frystyk Nielsen


Those issues haven't yet been covered for for the citation microformat.

It may be possible for for a generator to parse through them and extract 
the appropriate information though.
For example, honorific-prefix and honorific-suffix are a rather short 
list. Then after those, the given name, family name and additional name 
could be extracted in that particular order.

-- 
Paul Mark Wilkins
New Zealand Tourism Online
pmw57 at xtra.co.nz <mailto:pmw57 at xtra.co.nz>
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