TJamesWhite.com

Building a complete citation microformat from the ground up is a daunting task; and one that may not actually need to be done. Brian Suda and I have shot emails back and forth for the past couple of months discussing such a microformat.

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>