On 7/30/06 1:53 AM, "Simon Cozens" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hello folks; please don't shoot, I'm new here. Hi Simon and welcome to the list! > I've noticed on the wiki that > there's a relatively long discussion about citation formats, tending to focus > on creating microformats for full academic citations. From my point of view, > this seems to go against the "start as simple as possible" principle, but > let's move on. This is an excellent point of perspective to raise, and rather than "moving on", I recommend you add a statement about "a citation format as simple as possible" to the citation-brainstorming page: http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-brainstorming > I'm looking for something simpler and something a bit more immediate. > I'm working on an online book recommendation site > (http://www.youneedtoreadthis.com/) which will, obviously, display a lot of > information about books. I'd like that to contain semantic markup for all the > books: nothing too fancy, just title, author, maybe ISBN. I would imagine that > this is a fairly common usage case. The way to determine if it *is* a fairly common usage case or not is to document real world examples using the wiki. Fortunately a bunch of folks have started doing this. http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-examples That being said, if you have a set of "really simple citation" examples found on the Web I strongly urge you to add them to that wiki page. > Can I do this yet? Is there a citation format ready to use right now? Not yet. There is the <cite> tag for enclosing the entire citation, but nothing formal has been developed for distinguishing the structure. There are some proposals on the brainstorming page that you can try using and see if they work for you: http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-brainstorming Continuing in the thread... On 7/30/06 7:59 AM, "Fred Stutzman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I think microformat citations are a great idea. Hi Fred and thanks! > The good news is the hard > work has already been done for us. > > The .bib citation format is a flexible, open, and widely used bibliographic > format. <snip> > I believe our task could be as simple as microformatting the bib format. If the bib format was the overwhelmingly dominant bibliographic/citation format, it could be that simple. But it is not. It is one of many formats in wide use. See: http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-formats For the documentation and research that has been done on this. If you have additional data on usage, *please* add it to the existing documentation. The last time the "which format is newest / most widely in use / most interoperable" questions were asked, I believe OpenURL was the answer. I could be mistaken, I've only been on the periphery of the citation microformat work and there are several others here who are much more familiar with the state of the work. > I would warn us away from attempting to change the namespace. I'll put it another way, whatever the research in citation *examples* http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-examples leads us to in terms of 80/20 citation properties and schema, we very much SHOULD re-use the names of properties from one or more existing *formats*. > I would be willing to offer assistance in making this a reality. Great! First I would like to point you to the microformats process: http://microformats.org/wiki/process Second, the folks working on the citation microformat to date have done *a lot* of work along the lines of the process which I recommend you read to understand the current state of progress: http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-examples http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-formats http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-brainstorming http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-faq > If we are > going to take up citations, I strongly urge us to go the .bib route. We might end up re-using from the .bib vocabulary, and we might use another vocabulary (OpenURL) instead, or some other. Once there is consensus on the 80/20 schema from the examples, it is reasonable to discuss the merits of the various pre-existing citation formats in order to decide which vocabulary to re-use. Thanks, Tantek _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
