{"id":606,"date":"2007-05-27T12:44:03","date_gmt":"2007-05-27T16:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/2007\/05\/27\/more-on-bible-reference-microformats\/"},"modified":"2007-05-27T12:44:03","modified_gmt":"2007-05-27T16:44:03","slug":"more-on-bible-reference-microformats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/2007\/05\/27\/more-on-bible-reference-microformats\/","title":{"rendered":"More on Bible Reference Microformats"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/2007\/05\/bible-microformats\/\">OpenBible.info<\/a> picked up on <a href=\"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/2007\/05\/24\/annotating-scripture-references-in-blog-posts-a-modest-proposal\/\">my post about a microformat for Scripture references<\/a>, and very helpfully spelled out a number of important details, along with some clearer thinking on a few points.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Use the <tt>cite<\/tt> element (rather than <tt>abbr<\/tt> as i suggested). There&#8217;s more information <a href=\"http:\/\/microformats.org\/wiki\/citation\">here<\/a> at microformats.org about citation formats. I agree this is a better match with the intended semantics of the element (what was i thinking?).<\/li>\n<li>Treat the <tt>title<\/tt> attribute optional (as it is for XHTML in general): once you&#8217;ve established (via the <tt>class<\/tt> attribute) that something&#8217;s a Bible reference, you only need a title if the associated reference isn&#8217;t clear.<\/li>\n<li>For links, use the <tt>a<\/tt> element with <tt>class=\"bibleref\"<\/tt>.<\/li>\n<li>Forget about <tt>biblerange<\/tt> for indicating spans of text: once identified as a Bible reference, any reasonable representation of a range can probably be parsed. (I didn&#8217;t feel very strongly about this one to start with). I also think the suggestion for treating compound references makes sense: essentially, provide a title to disambiguate sub-elements that aren&#8217;t clear.<\/li>\n<li>The suggestion for putting an optional translation identifier first in the <tt>title<\/tt> attribute seems reasonable to me too.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m still a bit uneasy about internationalization issues, though. <tt>title = \"John 3:16\"<\/tt> adheres to existing standards in the English speaking world, but French would have Jean 3:16, Spanish Juan 3:16, etc. Though any of these are relatively unambiguous as identifiers within their own language context, there&#8217;s always a political side. In principle, a properly-formatted web\u00c2\u00a0 page would indicate the language of the content, which a parser could then use to parse references in a language-specific fashion.<br \/>\nFrankly, i&#8217;m still a little unclear about whether (<a href=\"http:\/\/microformats.org\/wiki\/SemanticXHTMLDesignPrinciples\">in microformat terms<\/a>) this is &#8220;semantic XHTML&#8221; or a microformat (though i think it&#8217;s the former). But this proposal seems clear enough to me to move forward with broader adoption: bibliobloggers, are you in? Some possible next steps:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>convince others to adopt this, and try to gather momentum<\/li>\n<li>design and promote a badge to indicate your blog uses the bibleref standard?<\/li>\n<li>lobby authors of Bible reference plugins for blogging platforms to adopt this<\/li>\n<li>a conversion service to take RSS feeds (in the several popular formats) that use bibleref markup and enhance them with links to an online Bible (similar to a <a href=\"http:\/\/geonames.wordpress.com\/2006\/05\/07\/rss-to-georss-converter\/\">RSS to GeoRSS converter<\/a>): this would help demonstrate the utility of the additional markup effort<\/li>\n<li>once the standard is more widely adopted, see if Technorati and other aggregators would agree to pick it up in their meta-data crawling<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As an aside for those who use Technorati-style tags in their posts (i do, though i haven&#8217;t properly exposed them in my WordPress template yet): i&#8217;m going to use &#8220;bibleref&#8221; as a tag for additional posts in this area, and i encourage you to do the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OpenBible.info picked up on my post about a microformat for Scripture references, and very helpfully spelled out a number of important details, along with some clearer thinking on a few points. Use the cite element (rather than abbr as i suggested). There&#8217;s more information here at microformats.org about citation formats. I agree this is a &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/2007\/05\/27\/more-on-bible-reference-microformats\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">More on Bible Reference Microformats<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}