Re: keys and variables

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Subject: Re: keys and variables
From: Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 19:46:35 -0400

On Aug 20, 2004, at 6:22 PM, Michael Kay wrote:

You're heading towards a meta-stylesheet: a transformation written in XSLT that converts your abstract (or generic) stylesheet into a concrete stylesheet. This is a perfectly feasible thing to do but you need to think very carefully about what you are trying to achieve.

The concrete issue is this:

There is no decent bibliographic formatting support in XML/XSLT suitable for the needs of scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This needs to change, or XML will never be a real alternative for the vast majority of scholars who currently are stuck with the duopoly of Word and Endnote.

At the same time, bibliographic formatting is difficult stuff, demanding the flexibility to reliably handle literally thousands of individual journal and publisher styles.

I don't think it's realistic to demand users and developers standardize on only one document and bibliographic format. I prefer using DocBook and MODS, others I've worked with prefer TEI, and still others something else.

In short, and in an ideal world of course, I want to be able to use the same core logic to format bibliographies and citations whether it is for a TEI, DocBook, OpenOffice or even WordML document data, or with different bibliographic metadata schema like MODS. I want the same core formatter to read the same XML formatting style files.

The idea is analogous to BiblioX (itself analogous to bibtex), but I feel like the core structure of that needs to be radically reworked, and I don't have the skill to do that:

http://www.silmaril.ie/bibliox

Perhaps it's best to just keep working on the stylesheets for my own needs and worry about configurability later, though.

Bruce

PS - Among other things, I'm the co-project lead for the OOoBib project at OpenOffice, where we want to use XSLT to handle the formatting:

http://bibliographic.openoffice.org


--
Bruce D'Arcus, PhD
Miami University
216 Shideler Hall
Oxford, OH 45056
513-529-1521

Current Thread
keys and variables Bruce D'Arcus - 20 Aug 2004 22:11:23 -0000 Michael Kay - 20 Aug 2004 22:23:40 -0000 David Carlisle - 20 Aug 2004 22:45:06 -0000 Bruce D'Arcus - 20 Aug 2004 23:46:48 -0000 <= Jeni Tennison - 21 Aug 2004 10:15:58 -0000 Bruce D'Arcus - 21 Aug 2004 11:03:56 -0000 Wendell Piez - 23 Aug 2004 19:25:02 -0000 Bruce D'Arcus - 21 Aug 2004 11:13:13 -0000

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