multibib design question

CSL Development
1

I’d like CiteProc to have a facility like the La/BibTeX package
multibib, which allows you to have more than one bib group. For
example, this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{multibib}
\newcites{ltex}{\TeX\ and \LaTeX\ References}
\begin{document}

References to the \TeX book \citeltex{Knuth:1991} and to Lamport’s
\LaTeX\ book, which appears only in the
references\nociteltex{Lamport:1994}. Finally a cite to a Postscript
tutorial \cite{Adobe:1985}.

\bibliographystyleltex{alpha}
\bibliographyltex{lit}

\renewcommand{\refname}{Postscript References}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{lit}
\end{document}

… results in two groups.

In my experience, I might have a group that represents archival
documents, or legal documents, and then a main group.

The question is, how should this be designed? Originally, I had it in
the CSL schema, such that it was basically genre-based, and the user
would not need to explicitly code for it in the document. The multibib
approach is quite different, which would suggest:

a) the citation coding should support a group attribute
b) if a user was authoring in, say, OOo, they’d explicit mark each
citation as part of a group.

Each has trade-offs.

Thoughts?

Bruce

2

So, here’s what I had earlier in CSL:

 <bibliography author-as-sort-order="first-author">
   <group>
<heading>Legal Documents</heading>
<reftype name="legal case" inherit-from="article"/>
<reftype name="bill" inherit-from="article"/>
   </group>

I’m getting rid of inheritance I think, because it will add complexity
with unclear benefit.

Then citations could be optionally ?

Of course, that attribute isn’t supported in DocBook, but you get the
idea.

How would you envision a GUI?

Bruce