Sebastian Fiedler comments about citing styles:
I really enjoy reading “Spike Hall”, “Sebastien Paquet”, and “Lilia Efimova”… but the way they render their posts has some serious draw back for anybody who wants to cite their stuff. Their posts hit my news aggregator literally flooded with font and color tags. This is awfully bad Web publishing practice in my point of view. I thought CSS has finally brought back the idea of keeping your content separate from your style. So, why would anybody want to hard code a freaking link color in his Weblog post? I don’t get it…
I recognise the problem. I try to have as less formatting as possible. I would add CSS style to the citations in my blog, but then I run into risk that they will not look like citations in blogs of others. Next to it I have to learn more of CSS to do it. Sorry, not now.
My list of problems of citing others:
- color and font formatting (I remove it or override it with my citating style)
- disappearing links (see the citation above and it’s original :)))
- lack of post permalinks (usually I go to the blog and add them manually)
- lack of clarity if this is a citation or not
I guess we have problems in citing others if their citing style if different from others and we have to understand and to change it (e.g. I have problems in citing Sebastian Fiedler, but it’s easy with Sébastien Paquet ;).
I dream about “agreed upon marking” of citations in blogs, so every author can use CSS to format it. I wrote about it earlier in weblog citations. I would be happy if someone with good technical skills could provide a solution.
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