Newbie Questions

CSL Development
1

Hi Bruce et al.,

I just joined your list because I just analyzed my needs, came up with
a rough schema of how I think citation processing should work, and
concluded that XBiblio shares almost or completely all of these views.

Here are a few questions that I could not immediately find the answers
for, without digging through the citeproc-0.6 code. Please excuse if
the answers are in the list archives; I did not find them at first
glance, thanks for pointing me to them:

  • The citation processor should permit processor-independent document
    encoding. RefDB doesn’t; its citation encoding is specific to RefDB,
    in both compact and full syntax. XBiblio does, doesn’t it? (Of
    course, there’s always the site-specific citation key, but this is
    hard to avoid unless one comes up with globally unique citation
    keys.)

  • How are grammar-sensitive references handled, e.g. if I cite Walsh
    (2005) and my own work (Piater, 2005)? In DocBook, I could imagine
    using the role attribute for this, but I’m not sure about other input
    languages.

  • Does XBiblio support multiple reference lists within the same
    document? This prevents simple linking to citation keys as XML ID
    values; one would have to resort to auto-generated IDs and/or more
    general XPointer links to non-ID attributes.

That’s it for now, I’ll probably ask loads of questions later…
Thanks,
Justus–
Justus H. Piater, Ph.D. http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~piater/
Institut Montefiore, B28 Phone: +32-4-366-2279
Université de Liège, Belgium Fax: +32-4-366-2620

2

Hi Justus,

  • The citation processor should permit processor-independent document
    encoding. RefDB doesn’t; its citation encoding is specific to RefDB,
    in both compact and full syntax. XBiblio does, doesn’t it?

It does. It’s just standard DocBook (NG).

  • How are grammar-sensitive references handled, e.g. if I cite Walsh
    (2005) and my own work (Piater, 2005)? In DocBook, I could imagine
    using the role attribute for this, but I’m not sure about other input
    languages.

Use the xrefstyle attribute on the db:biblioref element. I currently
use a value of “year” for the first one, and hand-code the author name
in the text. We can discuss the other option if you like.

  • Does XBiblio support multiple reference lists within the same
    document?

Not yet. I’ll figure that out once I get all the base functionality
working. I’m getting close.

This prevents simple linking to citation keys as XML ID
values; one would have to resort to auto-generated IDs and/or more
general XPointer links to non-ID attributes.

Why?

Bruce

3

Because XML IDs must be unique within a document, and you might want
to include the same reference in more than one reference list.

JustusBruce D’Arcus <@Bruce_D_Arcus1> wrote on Fri, 27 May 2005 06:53:47 -0400:

4

I hadn’t thought about that. I guess if you had a multi-chapter book
with different authors, they could indeed have duplicate references.

However, isn’t this just an abstract concern? We’re not dealing with
DTDs (schemas don’t validate id/idrefs). And the MODS records would
only be duplicated in memory; not in any real document.

The above isn’t really a rhetorical question: I’m not sure how to deal
with this practically. I still need to figure out how to configure
reference grouping in CSL.

Bruce

5

No, it’s a cross-linking issue. If you turn citations into hyperlinks,
and you have identical references in different chapters, which one do
you link to?

It seems to me that the back-end XSLT will have to identify, for a
given citation, the “closest following” matching refentry (assuming
they always “follow”…), attach a unique attribute to it, and link
the citation to that instead of the citation key.

JustusBruce D’Arcus <@Bruce_D_Arcus1> wrote on Fri, 27 May 2005 09:07:35 -0400:

6

Oh, you mean in the output docs? Am in a hurry, but I don’t think
that’s a problem. Just append a prefix (like id=“chapter1+doe99a”).

Would that work?

Bruce

7

Yeah, that’s what I had in mind. (Complicated path toward a simple
solution…)

JustusBruce D’Arcus <@Bruce_D_Arcus1> wrote on Fri, 27 May 2005 11:24:39 -0400:

8

BTW, I’ve considered adding a function that can do this automatically.

Will worry about it later though.

Bruce