[uf-discuss] Re: xfn and biographies

[Jim O'Donnell]

>>>
>> I'm thinking, at the moment, of avoiding hCard completely in the
>> letters themselves,
>
> Why? It adds good, semantic mark-up.
>
Practical reasons, really. The names in the letters aren't marked up  
specifically as names, or regularised in any way. The HTML is  
generated, not manually authored. The underlying XML looks something  
like
<rs type="person" key="41">Matt'w Flinders</rs>
but, equally, the text inside the <rs> tag could refer to Flinders as  
Captain Flinders, or use some other text to refer to him.

So I can't write an XSL transform to generate specific markup for  
particular cases, such as wrapping "Matt'w" in <abbr>.

I think this is one point that will come out of this project - to  
what level of granularity is it useful for the people transcribing a  
document to mark up the semantics of the contents. These particular  
papers have been marked up with references, but nothing more specific  
than that. Also, should we expect the people doing the transcribing,  
who are not web designers or developers, to have a knowledge of  
microformats, or should we provide tools to do the hard work for them.

>
>> I'll just mark that link up using rel="tag", where the tag URL points
>> to the biography currently at
>> http://www.nmm.ac.uk/flinders/ListPeople.cfm?ID=41
>> then use hCard to mark up Flinders as a person on that page. I think
>> what I'm saying is have one hCard per person on the site, which  
>> is  the
>> biography page, then link to those hCards as tags within the   
>> letters.
>> That seems a lot easier than faffing around with citations  and
>> different types of hCard.
>
> It may be easier, but is it better?
>
I don't think it's worse. We don't know, from the markup, that the  
string 'Matt'w Flinders' is a name but we do know that it's a  
reference to a hCard, and that hCard in turn can give us a name and  
URL (or URLs) for Flinders. Plus we have a network of documents that  
reference the same hCard, which is more useful, as a library tool,  
than a set of hCards which might be harder to link together.

Jim

Jim O'Donnell
jim at eatyourgreens.org.uk
http://eatyourgreens.org.uk
http://flickr.com/photos/eatyourgreens