Naming scheme for note styles

Some time ago, in the Zotero forum someone requested a version of Chicago that always shows the short title in subsequent citations, and that doesn’t follow the new rule to show only the author’s last name for position="ibid". While it wouldn’t be hard to implement such a requirement, the question remains how such a style should be named.

@bwiernik suggested “chicago-fullnote-short-title-subsequent”. While that would be absolutely reasonable I think it could be worthwhile to have a more general naming scheme for new styles. For note styles we could perhaps use a naming scheme that indicates how citations are rendered depending on their position: styleguide-note-first-subsequent-ibid

For CMoS this would mean:

  • Chicago fullnote style without the new ibid rule:
    chicago-note-full-short-short

  • Chicago note style that always uses short form:
    chicago-note-short-short-short

  • Chicago note style with ibid:
    chicago-note-short-short-ibid

  • Chicago note style with the new ibid rule
    chicago-note-short-short-authoronly(?)
    chicago-note-short-short-ibidlike(?)

Opinions?

Thanks for bringing this up. I agree settling on a convention would be good.

I’m actually more concerned with the human-readable names than with the filenames, though, as that’s what 98% of users sees. Our conventions from human-readable to filename are pretty good, so once we’ve agreed on the name (i.e CSL title) we should be able to settle on the filename quickly.

As a note, as we currently use the filename as ID, changing a lot of high-use style filenames isn’t great. @Dan_Stillman has requested (reasonably imo) that we convert IDs to UUIDs that remain stable, but the way I’m thinking about versioning this would be 1.2 or 2.0

Hmm, the human-readable names seem to be more tricky.
What about “Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (note, without Ibid.-like rule)”?
Or “Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (note, always short)”?
Doesn’t sound quite right. Better suggestions?

How about:

  • Chicago fullnote, per the manual, with ibid rule:
    chicago-fullnote

  • Chicago short note, per the manual, with ibid rule:
    chicago-note

  • Chicago fullnote, without ibid rule:
    chicago-fullnote-title-always

  • Chicago short note, without ibid rule:
    chicago-note-title-always

  • Chicago fullnote, with ibid:
    chicago-fullnote-ibid

  • Chicago short note, with ibid:
    chicago-note-ibid

That succinctly describes each style’s behavior.

@Sebastian_Karcher is there a need to retain both UUIDs and human-readable IDs, or is link rel=“self” and the title sufficient? It might be possible to incorporate UUIDs into 1.1 by retaining both. So <id> stays the same (or maybe even drops the zotero link) and a new <uuid> property is added. I don’t think that would impact the processors at all, and that would allow clients to continue to use existing behavior relying on the current system while also allowing transition to the stable UUIDs with time?

(In case not obvious, I also think that “bibliography” should be dropped from the file names for Chicago.)

Your suggestions sound good to me. And yes, bibliography should be dropped.

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That’s a question for @Dan_Stillman but as an approach I like the idea of simply adding a UUID element and keeping ID around at least for the next version and potentially adding a note for implementers recommending to switch to that as ID may change (or even be removed) in future versions

This I like for sure. I don’t think we’ve had any requests for a note version of this, so would leave that out for the time being. I’d be inclined t just add that now and then migrate the other styles later.

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Continued in my original thread on this: