RDFa

CSL Development
1

For those writing CSL implementations, RDFa has finally proceeded to
candidate recommendation status at the W3C. It’s also starting to see
support from various companies, software libraries, etc.

All of which is to say it might be worth considering offering an
RDFa-enhanced output option for the XHTML, since that would offer the
capability for data round-trippability. Just so happens that the new
bibo ontology is pretty easy to express in RDFa* :wink:

Bruce

  • I’m working on a new home web site that will include RDFa.
2

Thanks, I worked on a some citation formatting a while back for COiNS and
Zotero integration.

What are useful formatting cases? So far I had considered:

  • Plain text
  • XHTML
  • XHTML + COiNS

Now:

  • XHTML + RDFa (Bibo)

Are there other general purpose formats worth considering (ODF)? Is this
something worth standardising across implementations?

Regards,

Liam.2008/6/30 Bruce D’Arcus <@Bruce_D_Arcus1>:

3

What are useful formatting cases? So far I had considered:

  • Plain text
  • XHTML
  • XHTML + COiNS

Now:

  • XHTML + RDFa (Bibo)

Are there other general purpose formats worth considering (ODF)?

ODF is interesting, particularly now that Microsoft is more fully
supporting it, and that it’s getting some killer RDF support in 1.2.

Is this something worth standardising across implementations?

You mean what formats to support, or how to support them?

Bruce

4

BTW, Andrea added the ODF support to pandoc.

Bruce

5

Are there other general purpose formats worth considering (ODF)?

ODF is interesting, particularly now that Microsoft is more fully
supporting it, and that it’s getting some killer RDF support in 1.2.

Is this something worth standardising across implementations?

You mean what formats to support, or how to support them?

Just the formats. I think it would be handy if there were a minimal baseline
for input and output formats across implementations - but how the support is
provided is probably an internal implementation issue.

One possibility though for XHTML or ODF support would be to use XSLT to add
various RDFa or microformat “overlays”, i.e. to take generic XHTML:

CSL output

and generate:

CSL output

Minimal XSLT templates could be added to all implementations as a kind of
formatting decorator service. But I’m not sure this is significant enough a
use case to warrant further abstraction.

Regards,

Liam.>

6

And I’m not really sure how you’d do that. Stripping out unwanted
content is easy; adding RDFa to bare content would seem pretty much
impossible?

Bruce

7

Minimal XSLT templates could be added to all implementations as a kind of
formatting decorator service. But I’m not sure this is significant enough
a
use case to warrant further abstraction.

And I’m not really sure how you’d do that. Stripping out unwanted
content is easy; adding RDFa to bare content would seem pretty much
impossible?

I was assuming some access to the underlying CSL variables by the processing
engine. But this is probably better handled by formatter subclasses or
conditions rather than externalised through XSLT for the time being.

Regards,

Liam.