mla weirdness

CSL Development
1

Sure enough, as I start to do the MLA style, I’m faced with a design
problem (Harvard was no real problem, although the labels on locators
are a little funky).

See:

<http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/>

… in particular this discussion of the citation style:

<http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/02/>

So this is a non-standard “author-date” style. It in fact doesn’t use
dates in the citations.

I’m actually a little confused about the exact rules.

It seems to be that the bibliography is sorted by author-date, but
there is no disambiguation rule I can see for the years. It seems that
they instead use (short) titles in the citation to achieve the same
effect.

To be honest, I haven’t run across this before, and it’s not accounted
for in CSL.

Any suggestions?

Off the top of the head, it seems to me I may need to explicitly model
the disambiguation rules, and maybe assume the standard (1999a, 1999b)
stuff is standard. Not quite sure how to do this, but maybe in the
citation it’d be something like:

That would then be saying “if there is more than one reference from the
author, then add this field.”

I could see more than one way to handle a standard author-date
citation, but one of them would be:

Feels a bit awkward, in part because the logics of the two are not
really the same. In the first case, you are looking only at the author,
while in the second (and the common case) you are looking at both
author AND year.

Tricky …

Any opinions?

Bruce

2

Hmm … I guess a better way to approach this to say to that MLA is not
an author-date citation style, but rather another kind of in-text
style.

Right now, the disambiguation rules for author-date styles are
implicit; it is assumed if you have a class=“author-date” attribute on
the root that you will sort and group by author and year, and that you
disambiguate by adding a year suffix. It is not configurable.

We could call this another class – maybe “author-title”? – and also
have included the expected disambiguation behavior?

Bruce

3

So classes have characteristic disambiguation rules? That makes
intuitive sense to me.

–J

4

Yes. Author-date class always does the year-suffix thing.

One wrinkle with this is that one needs to specify the formatting for
the disambiguation title (in MLA, for example). So it’s not as
straightforward as author-date, where you really don’t need to
explicitly define it.

Bruce