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

[Charles McCathieNevile]

On Sat, 06 Jan 2007 04:13:54 +0100, Karl Dubost <karl at w3.org> wrote:

>
> Le 5 janv. 2007 à 20:12, James Graham a écrit :
>> That timing assumes that I have the book that I am quoting from open on 
>> the desk in front of me. It is just as likely that I am quoting from 
>> notes I made e.g. for the case of a reference book in a library (in 
>> which case I could write down the ISBN, if one exists, but would haveto  
>> do so in addition to writing down human friendly metadata like, say,the  
>> book's title and author which I could use to make sense of mynotes),  
>> that I'm quoting from memory, that I'm repeating a quote from a 
>> secondary source (e.g. looking up a quote from /Hamlet/ in a book of 
>> Shakespeare criticism because it is easier to find), quoting from abook  
>> without an ISBN or doing number of other things which prevent theISBN  
>> from being close at hand.
>
> Interesting because I do read a lot, I do write quotes a lot in my paper 
> notebook and one thing I do for every quotes I put is
> -> title, author, isbn and page number.
>
> why? because there are many editions of the same book, and if you wantto  
> find the reference in the physical object you will need the isbn(even if  
> sometimes this one is unstable as well. rare case)

ISBN is nice, if you happen to have it handy and know it. But there are  
probably
as many quotes from the Bible as from most sources, and people tend to  
quote "chapter
and verse" which is actually an extremely useful reference - much more so  
than
the ISBN for a particular edition.

It's a typical metadata/semweb scenario. You have some kind of useful  
data, but
different people have different kinds and relying on one particular version
fails as many people as it helps. (I like RDF because it was designed to  
provide
useful answers in the face of lots of partial information).

Having written a lot of stuff in the traditional academic world that is  
slowly
crawling to the Web, I don't see a lot of ISBN references. And because of  
my
field, perhaps, they are really not useful - a text might have a dozen
completely different editions in a single language, but has an internal
structure that is well-known and makes it easy to find. In the world of  
printed
media ISSN and ISBN are something akin to browser-specific hacks to find
something. Useful in theory, but not a good basis for any serious work  
directed
at the people who are actually going to read what you wrote.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
hablo español - je parle français - jeg lærer norsk
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