There’s a discussion emerging on the microformats-discuss list concerning a microformat citation standard. I believe a citation microformat could be incredibly valuable – it would give us a standards-based way to share and ingest web citations. As someone who uses Bibdesk rather than Refworks, I am really in need of such a Microformat.
The discussion is very early, but I’ve offered up the .bib citation format as a fine semantic to base the microformat citation standard upon. The .bib citation format is a flexible, open, and widely used bibliographic format. It is the LaTeX reference manager, but it is widely used and adopted by many reference-management applications (Including the glorious Bibdesk, Refworks) and software applications (OpenOffice, LaTeX).
I believe its very important that we get a microformats citation standard right – there’s so much existing software that supports existing standards, and we don’t want to lose out on that. So I’m waving my hands, asking people to hop in and support .bib as the format on which to base the citation microformat. The microformats community prides itself on not reinventing wheels, and leveraging existing standards – so I’m fairly sure they’ll see the value in bib. However, if you’d like to add your support for using bib as the microformat citation format, jump in the thread and contribute.
Tags: bibdesk
