Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: Bibliography management/BibTex equivalent

[Carlos Araya <carlos@cvc.edu>]

On 01/27/02 10:43, "Norman Walsh" <ndw@nwalsh.com> wrote:

> <biblioentry id="Walsh97">
> <abbrev>Walsh97</abbrev>
> <biblioset relation="article">
>   <title>A Guide to XML</title>
>   <author><surname>Walsh</surname><firstname>Norman</firstname></author>
>   <pubdate>1997</pubdate>
>   <copyright><year>1997</year><holder>ArborText, Inc.</holder></copyright>
>   <pagenums>97-108</pagenums>
> </biblioset>
> <biblioset relation="journal">
>   <title>XML: Principles, Tools, and Techniques</title>
>   <publisher>
>     <publishername>O'Reilly &amp; Associates, Inc.</publishername>
>   </publisher>
>   <issn>1085-2301</issn>
>   <editor><firstname>Dan</firstname><surname>Connolly</surname></editor>
> </biblioset>
> </biblioentry>
> 

<snip /> 
> The trick is writing stylesheet code that both
> 
> - Extracts all (and only) the relevant fields and
> - Inserts appropriate punctuation (where necessary)
> 
> and does so in such a way that it handles optional fields, reordered
> fields, etc.
> 
> For any given bibliography style, it's not too hard. But doing
> anything that works for you and me "out of the box" is essentially
> impossible.
Would it work better to have different stylesheets for different
bibliographical styles? Granted that it make maintaining them a lot harder
but on the other hand, we wouldn't have to deal with all the possible
permutations of elements that you folks are dealing with now.

Just a thought,
Carlos

-- 
Carlos E. Araya
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of the complexity of the ideal solution or 20 percent of the effort required
to build the ideal solution; or put another way, the last 20 percent of the
"ideal" feature set is what creates the most complexity