So I’m planning to add the changes to et-al we’ve discussed here
sometime this week. But given that it’s not backwards compatible, how
are we going to effect the transition? Zotero’s really the only
deployed implementation ATM, so the concrete question for Dan is when
is 1.0.4 going to be released, and can it include the update to
support this?
From a code perspective, the changes would basically mean that et al
doesn’t get applied unless there’s a cs:et-al element in the template,
so it should be a simple change.
Updating styles ought to be easy enough.
Bruce
Including et-al changes in 1.0.4 will depend on Simon’s availability.
We don’t have a specific date for 1.0.4, but we’re hoping to get it out
within the next week or so, since it’ll add Firefox 3 compatibility. The
current blockers are the citation editor on Firefox 3, which is Simon’s
department but which I should be able to fix if he doesn’t have the
time, and a nasty autocomplete bug in Firefox 3 that should be getting
patched by Mozilla folks in the next few days.
A lot of people are waiting for Firefox 3 compatibility, so unless the
et-al changes can be made quickly, we’ll probably put out 1.0.4 as soon
as the autocomplete bug is fixed and include the et-al changes in 1.0.5.
Once a version with the et-al changes is out, we can stop serving the
default styles to pre-1.0.4/5 clients if the new CSLs won’t work with
older versions of Zotero.
OK.
Come to think of it, I don’t think this change should negatively
impact current implementations, since they can just ignore the new
cs:et-al element and proceed as usual. In that case, the only
consequence of not updating the code would be that a style that
specifies it gets rendered as italic would be ignored, and it would
instead just be plain text.
Right? Johan; do you agree?
If yes, then we ought to just make the changes in both CSL and styles
ASAP, and hope Simon can updated his code so the people clamoring for
proper support for, say, the Nature styles, are happy.
Bruce