In addition to a greater understanding of microformats for me, we believe that we have come up with a starting point: instead of addressing a full citation microformat, we have a couple of design patterns that address what people have been asking for.

For my concern, that means starting with how to format a book title.

The design pattern that Brian floated is the schema class=”title-*”. The beauty is that it is simple and extensible — i.e. title-movie, title-poem, title-novel, title-song — providing a semantic hook on which to hang our css:

I was reading <cite class="title-book">The Stars My Destination</cite>, which was originally titled <cite class="title-book">Tiger! Tiger!</cite> after William Blake's poem <span class="title-poem">The Tyger!</span>. You can find more information in <span class="title-reference">Science Fiction Writers</span>.



.title-book { font-style: italic; }
.title-poem:before { content: open-quote; }
.title-poem:after { content: close-quote; }
.title-reference { text-decoration: underline; }


Resulting in:

I was reading The Stars My Destination, which was originally titled Tiger! Tiger! after William Blake’s poem The Tyger!. You can find more information in Science Fiction Writers.

[This is, of course, just a sample of how the titles could be styled. Also note that the use of :before and :after is ignored by Internet Explorer.]

Now that the human quotient is taken care of, we have something for machines as well. Since I’m not a programmer, I’ll just excerpt from one of Brian’s emails:

When we convert this to BibTeX we have to use X2C-bibtex.xsl, since a bibtext reference can only handle one title it looks for class=”title”and would ignore title-alternative and alt-title, so there is no +/- for which style to use (the general title-* or the specific name like alt-title, producer, editor, etc.)

The next format we choose is something like Z39.80. When we transform that we use X2C-z39.80.xsl, since there is a specific place for alternate title and regular title, when populating that citation the xslt looks for class=”title” for the title and class=”title-alternative” or class=”alt-title” for the alternate title, so no +/- for general or specific because it is looking for specific instances anyway.

Now the third possibility (and this is a mythical format, but I’m sure one exists, we’ll call it FOOBAR). In foobar you can have multiple title elements:
<foobar>
<title></title>
<title></title>
</foobar>

Now when we use X2C-foobar, it will look for class=”title-*”, so it will find title and title-alternate and apply them BOTH to just the <title> element in the output. It will ever actually find the class=”alternative-title” unless we specifically are searching for that.

The title-* (i think) make things more extensible, so this year we have title, title-alternate, title-translated. But next year or in the future there might be a need for title-webversion, or title-trailer. Formats like bibtext and z39.80 are not effected because they never had a place to stick these things anyway, but foobar does, and instead of ‘rewriting’ the X2C code for each now title-XXXX that appears (or in the specific case adding a class=”webversion-title”) and account for that, we can just fall back on the title-* wildcard.

Brian wants to apply the same design pattern to date-time: . class=”dt-published”, dt-created, dt-modified, dt-revision-2, dt-release-us, dt-release-uk, etc.

Now, this is not to say that I’m completely abandoning a full bibliographic microformat. In fact, we need something fairly quickly at work, so I’m going to forge ahead with something, probably along the lines of:
Note: this isn’t meant to be a Microformat, just a format for use at work

<span class="citation">
    <span class="title-article">"FROG."</span>
    <span class="title-">Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary</span>.
    <span class="editor">Ed. Kathleen Edgar</span>.
    <span class="volume">Vol. 2</span>.
    <span class="edition">34th ed.</span>
    <span class="publisher">Detroit: Gale</span>,
    <abbr class="dt-published" title="2005">2005</abbr>.
    <span class="title-publication">Gale Virtual Reference Library</span>.
    <span class="publisher">Thomson Gale</span>.
    <span class="user">Gale Internal User</span>.
    <abbr class="dt-accessed" title="2005-12-14">14 December 2005</abbr>
</span>

Brian’s citation pages look to be on target to me. We should certainly move forward with choosing a format to follow and go from there. (Brian – any thought of adding z39.80 to your formats table?)

As for a separate book review format, there really isn’t a need. Microformats are modular by nature (yes?) so you would simply use relevant bits of the citation format within hReview. Likewise, author names in the citation format could be marked up based on the hCard format. I’ve recently added hReview (using hCard for reviews’ names) to the reference reviews on our Web site (reviews.gale.com). I’d also like to mark up the products being reviewed and a citation format seems natural. On a personal note, I’d simply like a way to mark up book titles. There just isn’t a good way to do that at the moment.

Additionally, as I mentioned in my last email, we are rebuilding our online products core code at the moment to be semantically driven XHTML. We produce reference products for all libraries of all levels. So, when conducting a search on, say frogs, a number of articles (journal, newspaper, etc) citations are returned. We need to do a couple of things with these and having them semantically marked up would certainly help.

First, users can create bibliographic citations right from the results page or the article page. Citation formats include MLA, APA and Z39.80. Current output looks something like (with book titles set in italics):

[MLA style]
“Frog, Goliath.” Endangered Species. Eds. Sonia Benson and Rob Nagel. Vol. 3: Amphibians, Fish, Plants, and Reptiles. 2nd ed. Detroit: U*X*L, 2004. p533-535. 3 vols.

[z39.80]

AT Frog
CT Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary
CY 2005
DB Gale Virtual Reference Library
XX Service Name: Thomson Gale
XX Date of Access:31 October 2005
IL http://find.galegroup.com/gvrl/infomark.do ... [truncated by me]
AL General
BE Edgar, Kathleen
BN 0-7876-6667-X
CV Information and Publishing
DI CX3440403163
DP 2005
EB 0-7876-9383-9
ED 34th
LG English
ND 20041220
OT D-I
PB Gale
PL Detroit
RM COPYRIGHT Thomson Gale
VI CX3440403163
VO 2
XX Full Text
ZZ

It only makes sense to mark up the citations right from the beginning in a way that would allow output in either of these (or other) formats. Knowing each piece of the citation would make that pretty easy.

Secondly, from a purely presentation point of view, we need to present citations on screen in a standard manner. While most products present them in MLA format, some break the elements onto multiple lines.

“Frog, Goliath.” Endangered Species
Eds. Sonia Benson and Rob Nagel
Vol. 3: Amphibians, Fish, Plants, and Reptiles. 2nd ed. Detroit: U*X*L, 2004. p533-535. 3 vols.

Again, knowing each piece of the puzzle makes this pretty easy to do.