On 3/28/06, Michael McCracken <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, so since we've got a large number of examples on the examples > page, I think it's time to float an initial version of a citation > microformat.
I think this is a good start. I'd vote for volume and issue number being separately demarcated. Also, I've asked before about spinning off a single-class microformat for a URI; this is another case where having that might save some work here. In general, though, there's a disconnection in discussion here, on the cite-examples page, and on the cite-formats page that should be cleared up to really make progress. I think the cite-brainstorming document makes a usefully accurate and crucial distinction that we need to be more rigorous about (under "Citation vs. media-info"): "What distinguishes a cite from say media-info (e.g. media-info-examples) is that a cite is a reference to something explicitly external to the current piece of content or document, whereas media-info describes information about content embedded or inline in the current document." The collected examples and notes don't exactly follow that. For example, on cite-examples there are snippets from "product pages" and publisher "detail pages" (see the first several listed examples). By the statement above, these are not citations regarding external content. As a librarian, I'd thump on the distinction between "bibliographic records" and "citations/references" here; the non-citation examples are "bibliographic" in that they are descriptions of content which provide people with enough information to make a choice about whether the content at hand is the content they want. Citations, as references to external content, provide just enough information to people interested in the content at hand can follow a line of thinking through some other external content. A citation, once somebody decides they need to see what it references for themselves, should provide just enough information so that that person can then go find that item in whatever way makes sense, immediately or thirty years later... ultimately, if they can find it, they will have to make the bibliographic decision -- the "is this content what I'm looking for" bit -- about the item that was just the citation at first. Sure, that probably sounds perfectly academic, and the lines between these activities a lot more blurry than this, since the use cases overlap all the time, especially online. But, the helpful part of the distinction is that when you're examining a reference external to the content at hand, you don't need the full bibliographic details. This immediately lets you eliminate stuff like subjects/keywords, pricing, copyright, licensing, owner, format, coverage, and audience, all of which are mapped in the citation-formats. You wouldn't put pricing information in a resume or CV. You wouldn't put a copyright statement in a reference at the end of a journal article. You wouldn't list "audience" in a reading list for a seminar. Etc. Y'all have your hands full enough dealing with media-info. :) To make progress on citations, I'd go for the simplest possible subset(**), and your strawman looks close to that. I'd also suggest that we clean up the cite-* pages to reflect this distinction more aggressively so that folks new to the process might be directed more clearly. If this seemed agreeable to people I'd be happy to help with that, but I won't touch anything unless somebody says to. (** to be precise, I'd just reuse the profiles defined in OpenURL for journals and books to start, since those are explicitly barebones subsets for following references, but you've heard that from me before...) -- C. Hudley We Know The Truth, Inc. _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss