I just added support for AdaptiveBlue’s AB Meta format on all book pages. I’m only supporting type, author and title because that’s all the metadata I have in the source XML. Hopefully I can find some content from other sources which is tagged in more detail.
I chose to use the Dublin Core namespace (rather than AdaptiveBlue’s) because it’s more familiar to me and more widely used in the industry.
Ironically it was much simpler to add AB Meta to my Django source code than it was to even explain how to do it in WordPress, as I did in a post on the Tools of Change blog.
Responses to “AB Meta microformat support added”
May 5th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Good point! An example is the Pride and Prejudice book page. If you View Source you will see three elements in the HTML head of the document:
<meta name=”dc:type” content=”book” />
<meta name=”dc:title” content=”Pride and Prejudice” />
<meta name=”dc:creator” content=”Jane Austen” />
Note that this is HTML/AB Meta using DC names, not Dublin Core itself. I could literally add Dublin Core-namespaced markup to my XHTML, but no existing tools would be able to read it, and it might confuse legacy browsers that don’t understand XML namespaces. AB Meta shoehorns Dublin Core names into HTML, which is straightforward for existing search engines to index and solves the backwards-compatibility problem.
I could also insert Dublin Core into the source XML (which is marked up as TEI and now directly downloadable from that same book page), but I wouldn’t be adding any new information.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:22 am
Oh hey, look at that. Thanks. I’m now using both AB Meta’s format and Dublin Core’s.
May 12th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
[...] week, Liza Daly blogged about adding AB Meta to the ThreePress - a set of open source tools for [...]
May 12th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Liza,
Thank you for your support and great tutorial on TOC. We have blogged about your implementation on BlueBlog:
http://blog.adaptiveblue.com/?p=1021
It would be great to talk to you about how people are using ThreePress. Drop me a line on how we can connect.
Thanks again!
Alex
May 5th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
A link to a published example would be good; but in the absence of one, how is what you did different to simply adding Dublin Core metadata?