One question that’s been bugging me – and it may have an embarrassingly straightforward answer – is why the AuthorDateStyle, AuthorStyle, NumberStyle, and LabelStyle classes have mandatory and elements. I’m confused because, in Zotero, the APA and MLA styles only export the bibliography, even though they also include styles for the citation. Is this an idiosyncrasy of Zotero? Shouldn’t one CSL somehow encompass all variants of a particular style? If so, how would parsing software determine what styles the user wants?
One question that’s been bugging me – and it may have an
embarrassingly straightforward answer – is why the AuthorDateStyle,
AuthorStyle, NumberStyle, and LabelStyle classes have mandatory
and elements.
Someone else asked this recently too. The answer is indeed simple:
because it’s a Citation Style Language. Whether you’re actually
outputting the citations is up to the application (and perhaps the
user), and so there’s not really any problem for you to ignore the
citation templates if you don’t need them. But without them, formatting
of documents (the primary use case) cannot work.
And indeed, given the new Word plug-in, Zotero needs this too
notwithstanding what it is otherwise doing.
I’m confused because, in Zotero, the APA and MLA styles only export
the bibliography, even though they also include styles for the
citation. Is this an idiosyncrasy of Zotero? Shouldn’t one CSL somehow
encompass all variants of a particular style? If so, how would parsing
software determine what styles the user wants?
Not following here. What do you mean by “all variants”?
Bruce
Someone else asked this recently too. The answer is indeed simple:
because it’s a Citation Style Language.
It is truly an embarrassingly straightforward answer. Thanks for humoring me.
Not following here. What do you mean by “all variants”?
By “all variants” I meant a style’s bibliography and citation – I misused the word. But your previous explanation cleared this up. I was confused because, for APA and MLA, Zotero doesn’t include citations with the bibliography, even when both are present in the CSL. Apparently this is expected behavior.
Zotero does actually contain code for formatting both citations and
bibliography, which you can see in action with the Word plug-in.
Otherwise, it’s not currently exposed, although it probably should be.
Simon
No worries 
Bruce