[whatwg] <blockquote cite> and <q cite>

On 1/19/07, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>
> > My point was that BibTeX/LaTeX/TeXlipse users are already receptive
> > to the idea that they have to provide rich metadata for citations, so
> > a UI test would not be a matter of testing *if* they provide the data
> > but about *how* they like to provide it.
>
> Oh I see: you mean whether people prefer entering ISBNs or typing out
> all the metadata by hand? Why isn't LibraryThing already a good test
> that shows that people like to use ISBN lookup? And given the lookup can
> work either way (from book details to ISBN or from ISBN to details),
> what exactly would it mean if 2/3 were masochists who prefer hand entry
> of book details?

On LibraryThing, I use book title or sometimes author + book title. I
only pull out ISBN for disambiguation with old books that have too
many editions, but where I want the right cover to show up.

ISBN is not an intuitive concept. It's like being asked your account
number when you call your tech support. You want them to look you up
by name, address, phone number, or virtually anything else but unique
account number -- account numbers should be relegated to the inside of
databases and exposed only in exceptional cases.

Account numbers are not human-readable. Neither are ISBN. You can't
proofread them for typos, and search engines can't error-correct
mistyped ISBNs the way they can for mistyped authors and mistyped
titles.

I have nothing against citing by ISBNs, but if I ever cite, it will be
by book title and author, by movie title and director, by song title
and singer. HTML5 can support both, but it should at least support the
latter.

--
Leons Petrazickis

Received on Friday, 19 January 2007 09:08:48 UTC