Scott Lemon sent me a note about Firefox Scholar, (more) a proposed plug-in for Firefox that would make using citation data on the Web easier. I'm not clear on how different it is from CiteULike other than being browser based instead of Web based.

That got me thinking that their ought to be a microformat for BibTeX. While I was looking around, I ran into this page at microformats.org and that led me to information on COiNs, a way of inserting citation data into a <span/>. It's not a microformat since it doesn't tag individual elements in ways that would allow them to be seen by humans and read by machines--a key microformats principle. There's a COiNs generator it you want to play with embedding it in your site.

This makes me think all the more that academic papers ought to be published as HTML as the preferred format. Then all the bibliographic data could be embedded in a machine readable format (not to mention other data related to the article). Does anyone know of a nice paper-publishing CSS set that includes CSS for Web and print formatting?