I’d been thinking about a Zen OPAC idea for quite awhile and now see that dchud thinks similarly. My first thought was to use some of the requirements being that it uses markup similar to what current template set-ups allow in commercial OPACs. I then scraped that and thought should be from scratch and try to get the most semantic markup as possible. Regardless, I think the markup will be the first step and probably the most time intensive. Once the markup is decided it will be cool to see what people do with it. Hopefully the idea takes off with dchud behind it and not just my musings.

In relation to this, when I first looked at markup I looked at things like the early discussion for hcite and other microformats. Then I remembered COinS and figured that might work. My memory apparently failed as I thought it was more useful then a single span with a nasty openurl string in it. As it is I’m not surprised not many use it. I was hoping for a more microformat-ish setup with a span for COinS and then sub-classes for the various key-value pairs. As it stands it doesn’t seem very useful for things other then the few openurl use cases. Hopefully things proceed with hcite or a mashup of other formats that might add at least a bit more usefulness then a semi-hidden partial link.

Regardless I look forward to seeing what comes of the zen opac idea.