definition-examples

Dictionary examples

Purpose

ChrisMessina hacked Apple's Dictiontionary.app to see how it works. He discovered some interesting markup. User: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?