Hello all,
Questions/remarks:
a) RefType usage
apa.csl:
…
This makes parsing more difficult because I have to check wether or
not refType is present.
I was wondering when someone would complain about this 
Can I suggest to always use the latter form
for apa.csl too:
In the alt schema I was playing with:
So the substantive question is why do you have itemLayout as a child of
refType?
One of the reasons I hadn’t done this before was that I thought it
somewhat awkward. A reftyp element seems to say “formatting depends on
type” while adding the generic attribute seems to say “well no, not
really.”
A secondary question is if we want to revisit naming conventions and
make sure they’re consistent.
b) Fallback refType
How to handle a reference for which no reftype is defined in the CSL?
E.g. a user quotes a review but the apa.csl doesn’t say how to format
it.
Ah, this is critical to understand, and I need to include it in the
schema.
Article, chapter, and book are simultaneously fallbacks. This is why I
have required them.
In citeproc-xsl, every reference has two properties: class (monograph,
part-inMonograph, part-InSerial), and type.
When formatting, cp first looks for a type (say “article-journal”). If
it does not find one, it uses the fallback for its class.
What this means is that almost all references use the fallback. It
makes formatting more robust, and styles more compact.
c) Name object
In Python I want to use a object to represent names.
class Name:
def init(self, givenName, surName, naturalOrder=“given-sur”,
vander=“”, prefix=“”, suffix=“”):
self.prefix = prefix
self.givenName = givenName # E.g. “John” or “J.W.” or
“Johan Willem”
self.vander = vander # E.g. “vön” or “de” or
“d’”
self.surName = surName # E.g. “Arcus”
self.suffix = suffix # E.g. “junior”
self.naturalOrder = naturalOrder # “given-sur” or
“sur-given”
What was again the right nomenclature for those words like “vön” or
“van der” as in “Klaus vön Nierop” or “Jan van der Berg”?
It’s called an articular.
Since you’re in a place where they are important, it’s up to you to
decide if they should there. I suspect in many cases they would be
folded into the family name, but then you need to account for that in
code.
Would this be sufficient to store/represent names properly?
I’d suggest either forename/surname or givenname/familyname. The first
is somewhat broader, though the second is how vcard handles it.
I’d change naturalOrder to sort_order, and maybe have a default of
family-given (or sur-fore).
Also, how would you handle organizational authors?
Finally, shouldn’t attributes use the underscore convention in Python?
So “given_name” rather than “givenName”?
d) How names are to be written
Perhaps we should in CSL define how to write names?
E.g.
It seems more flexible that way to me than to use “form=“short”” plus
it has the advantage that it is more obvious what is meant, as someone
just looking at a CSL won’t know what is meant with the short form.
This is one of those decisions I made to leave it up to implementors,
and I still feel that was a good decision.
I’m open to revisiting it though.
e) Sorting names
Does “van der Berg” go with the “V” or the “B”? Dutch will sort it
with the “B”, the Flemish with the “V”.
So Dutch sorting rules ignore the articular for sorting, but the
Flemish do not. This is among the reasons I don’t define naming and
name sorting in CSL 
But in your software, you probably need some logic based on the locale
for sorting. It might be as a simple as a flag to use the articular
for sorting.
It just occurred to me that while I’ve studied how Western authors deal
with formatting Asian names, I’ve no clue how it would work in the
reverse!
Bruce