[whatwg] Bibliography Markup in HTML5

[Ian Hickson]

On Sun, 27 Sep 2009, tjeddo wrote:
>
> I am surprised at how little concern there seems to be over the lack of 
> bibliography markup in HTML5.

There's a lot of concern, but it was deemed that microdata is a better way 
of addressing this than specific elements.


> What if HTML5 specified this approach--except that in place of the <dl> 
> (definition list) tags, a collection of entries would be contained 
> between <bibliography> tags? That is, the above example would look as 
> follows:
> 
> <bibliography> ...
> 
> <dt id="refsRFC5322">[RFC5322]</dt>
> <dd><cite><a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5322.txt">Internet Message
> Format</a></cite>, P. Resnick. IETF, October 2008.</dd>
> 
> ...
> </bibliography>
>
> The value here is the elimination of ambiguity

What ambiguity?


> and that a number of new inferences can now be drawn by user agents.  
> With the <dl> tags, the interpreting agent can only determine that there 
> is a definition list containing term/definition entries.  Whereas, in 
> the context of a new bibliography section element, user agents can 
> unambiguously interpret the 'dt' element to be the displayed content 
> that humans identify a bibliography entry by (e.g., "[RFC5322]" in the 
> example given).

Why is this valuable? How do you expect browser vendors to change their 
interface to use this?

Why would it not be better to have a microdata vocabulary for this?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'