ramping up styles

Was chatting with Zotero’s Dan Cohen yesterday about ramping up the
number of CSL styles.

To do that I think we first need to nail down CSL 1.0. Simon, if you
can spare a bit of time, can you help me figure out where the new
conditional should go in the schema and take a final look to see if its
ready for 1.0?

After that, we need a quick way to author styles. A short-term option
might be a makebst-like script?

Bruce

By makebst-like you mean a series of questions and answers?

Seems like a web-app would be the best option for that, because it
would let us see the variations that people were trying, and to
collect feedback on the types of options required (and why), as well
as ‘suggesting’ styles to people as a result of their answers to the
questions. That would also serve as the ‘hub’ for announcements of
new versions of styles and updates (something that BibTeX always
lacked, IMHO).

I’m still almost totally ignorant about XML styling and XPATH, and
thus CSL, but I might be able to contribute to a Ruby on Rails
interface that helped people explain their needs and work with people
to work out how to write the required CSL for the series of answers.

I’m imagining something with the elements of document types that can
be dropped into a line along with various types of punctuation, and a
way to ‘bless’ an element as the default sorting element. I realize
that this will need to be in-synch with the way that the underlying
CSL code works …

–J