- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2011 21:36:36 +0300
17.07.2011 18:07, Nils Dagsson Moskopp wrote: >>> But browsers need to be told that that number close to the quotation >>> is an ISBN. >> >> The string ?ISBN? is sufficient evidence of that. > > Someone would need to standardize ?ISBN sniffing behaviour? for UAs > then. Could you make a proposal? I think it would be rather trivial. The string ?ISBN? followed by something that matches the syntax of ISBN numbers, perhaps allowing some variation in punctuation, could be treated as an implicit link to a resource _if_ you have some mechanism(s) for mapping ISBN numbers to URLs. The key issue is whether browser vendors have interest in it and which mechanism(s) would be used. After all, an ISBN could be in a multitude of ways, like querying an online bookshop, querying an online bibliographic system, or querying an site of books in digital format online. Which one should be used? Would it be useful? To be really useful, it should be handled so that the browser checks what it can get using the ISBN and then make that information available to user (how to get bibliographic info, how to read reviews, how to buy the book, how to borrow it in a library, download or read the book via the net for free or for fee). > Are any reasons for not doing anything with that information known? > Probably a more basic issue: Is the cite attribute actually used? I don?t think it?s much used in the wild, except on pages by organizations that define HTML specs. What might be the motivation for browsers to do something special with it? Surely you could make things so that by clicking on a blockquote, the user accesses the resource pointed to by the cite attribute. Browsers could do that, and so could authors. But would users actually start clicking on quotations to see their sources? Surely they would far more probably click on the title of a work in visible credits if present and if it is a link, so what would the cite attribute help? >>> <Cite> contains a human-readable name of a work. That'll >>> rarely be machine-readable. >> >> HTML documents are always machine-readable. (Well, you _might_ just >> write HTML on a paper with a pen?) > > This is a category error. ?Machine-readable? in this context does not > mean ?digital information?. No, it?s not a category thing. It?s about the relativity of being ?machine-readable.? You are probably thinking of data in a specific format designed to be easily parseable and useable by computer software, such as a URL, an ISO 8601 date notation, or an XML tag. But browsers already do many kinds of heuristics, parsing data that doesn?t really match the specs. A title of a work is easily useable by software: put it inside quotation marks and throw it at Google, and the odds are that you get some useful links related to it, if there?s info on the work (and perhaps the work itself) on the web at all. Well, assuming that the title is relatively unique. Titles of works are often more useful in the long run than URLs. URLs change far too often when sites are revamped or for other reasons. I think a good start would be to add an optional (but usually recommended) <credits> or <source> element for use inside <blockquote>. -- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Sunday, 17 July 2011 11:36:36 UTC