definition-examples

Dictionary examples

Purpose

ChrisMessina hacked Apple's Dictiontionary.app to see how it works. He discovered some interesting markup. RyanKing suggested that the community collect examples of dictionary and thesaraus lists. Create a section below to add your own real world examples

Dictionary.app

I (ChrisMessina) 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>

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?