A Bibliographic Example

As promised, I’ll briefly set out an example of what I think a bibliographical microformat entry might look like. This example would be taken from a works consulted list:

<div class="biblio mlaStyle">
<p>
<span class="author"><span class="surname">Smith</span>, 
<span class="name">John</span></span>. 
<cite class="book">The Book of Books</cite>. 
<span class="pubLoc">London</span>: <span class="pub">Routledge</span>, 
<span class="pubDate">2005</span>.
</p>
</div>

The code above should produce the following rendering:

There are probably some redundancies there, but I think that’ll cover the main features of the concept.

The entry is wrapped in a div class="biblio mlaStyle". The “biblio” class is to indicate that it’s part of the microformat, and the “mlaStyle” class indicates that it’s in the MLA citation style.

Here, spans are used to associate meaning to words such as the name of the author of the piece—note I haven’t decided here how to handle multiple authors—and the publication details.

The cite element has a class attribute that sets the document type—though perhaps it might be better added to the surrounding div. The system should be flexible enough to accept a bibliographic entry for any kind of work, from books, to journal articles, to DVDs, to television commercials.