[uf-discuss] Re: xfn and biographies

Sun Jan 27 03:37:21 PST 2008

>>>>> I'm thinking, at the moment, of avoiding hCard completely in the
>> letters themselves,
>> Why? It adds good, semantic mark-up.
>Practical reasons, really. The names in the letters aren't marked up 
specifically as names, or regularised in any way. The HTML is 
generated, not manually authored. The underlying XML looks something 
like
<rs type="person" key="41">Matt'w Flinders</rs>
but, equally, the text inside the <rs> tag could refer to Flinders as 
Captain Flinders, or use some other text to refer to him.
So I can't write an XSL transform to generate specific markup for 
particular cases, such as wrapping "Matt'w" in <abbr>.
I think this is one point that will come out of this project - to 
what level of granularity is it useful for the people transcribing a 
document to mark up the semantics of the contents. These particular 
papers have been marked up with references, but nothing more specific 
than that. Also, should we expect the people doing the transcribing, 
who are not web designers or developers, to have a knowledge of 
microformats, or should we provide tools to do the hard work for them.
>>> I'll just mark that link up using rel="tag", where the tag URL points
>> to the biography currently at
>> http://www.nmm.ac.uk/flinders/ListPeople.cfm?ID=41
>> then use hCard to mark up Flinders as a person on that page. I think
>> what I'm saying is have one hCard per person on the site, which 
>> is the
>> biography page, then link to those hCards as tags within the 
>> letters.
>> That seems a lot easier than faffing around with citations and
>> different types of hCard.
>> It may be easier, but is it better?
>I don't think it's worse. We don't know, from the markup, that the 
string 'Matt'w Flinders' is a name but we do know that it's a 
reference to a hCard, and that hCard in turn can give us a name and 
URL (or URLs) for Flinders. Plus we have a network of documents that 
reference the same hCard, which is more useful, as a library tool, 
than a set of hCards which might be harder to link together.
Jim
Jim O'Donnell
jim at eatyourgreens.org.uk
http://eatyourgreens.org.uk
http://flickr.com/photos/eatyourgreens