Alison Pope's Library tagged openurl →  View Popular

OpenURL is partly a solution to a problem we had to solve before there were microformats. We started doing stuff that looked like OpenURL in 1998, and it was immediately effective, and today resolvers all over the world can happily interoperate with COinS (however crappy the usability of today's resolver interfaces might be).

That doesn't mean we wouldn't abandon OpenURL and COinS altogether if a microformat took off that did solve all of this problem.

Fyi, the other part of the OpenURL equation is about what happens when you actuate the link at the resolver or remote site (the end point of a requested service offered by a resolver after you follow an OpenURL link). It doesn't seem likely that a proper microformat will address that piece. So, even if the book/journal microformats go forward successfully, there's still more work to do, and it might even still make sense to keep repeating ourselves. Or at least make sure that code we write can effectively generate the COinS piece from the microformat. :)