Sorting MLA

MLA is sorted author-title, rather than author-date. We could:

  1. Take a sort-macro instead of a sort-algorithm option. This would
    make author-date styles 4 lines longer, but would be versatile. We
    would then have:




  1. Add “author-title” sort algorithm. This is simply, but not
    extensible.

  2. Do both of the above (or perhaps, add ).

Simon

I vote for #1. Not only is it extensible, it’s less ambiguous.

The option “author-title” or “author-date” is really just a name, a tag. If
it’s named well, maybe it says/indicates/suggests what the sort order is,
but as a CSL writer, I can’t really be sure of that. If I see “author-date”,
am I safe in assuming that means, sort first by author in ascending order
then by date in ascending order, and nothing else? Or does it just mean:
Sort by the method used in author-date systems; if you don’t know what that
is, go look it up somewhere. Maybe when I go look it up in an author-date
style guide, I’ll find that the sort algorithm used is author ascending,
then date ascending, then title ascending. Or, no, maybe another style that
calls itself author-date recommends author ascending, then date descending.
If “author-date” is really just a name, I have to go find out what it means
in CSL.

Even if CSL’s author-date meant what I want, I wouldn’t mind typing those
extra few lines in a . I’d spend less time doing that
than I would confirming what “sort = author-date” means in CSL.

Also, I suggest including a way to specify ascending and descending. Not
needed for author, but could surely be useful with dates.

John>-----Original Message-----

Yes, I see how this could be useful. But, how to formalize it in XML
while re-using elements? It seems like we’d either need an attribute
on all variables that just gets ignored during formatting, or we’d
need to come up with a different way of specifying sort order.

Simon

Simon Kornblith wrote:

Also, I suggest including a way to specify ascending and
descending. Not
needed for author, but could surely be useful with dates.

Yes, I see how this could be useful. But, how to formalize it in XML
while re-using elements? It seems like we’d either need an attribute
on all variables that just gets ignored during formatting, or we’d
need to come up with a different way of specifying sort order.

We’d have to do the latter I think; something like:

… right?

Whatever the solution is, it needs to be easy for the common case.

Bruce

This looks good. I’ll make a child element of /
and allow (macro | variable), sort? attributes on
then.

Simon

Simon Kornblith wrote:

We’d have to do the latter I think; something like:

… right?

This looks good. I’ll make a child element of /
and allow (macro | variable), sort? attributes on
then.

Seems reasonable.

Just to make sure, how we would we configure a style like APA, where we
also wanted the citation sorted author-date, and we wanted all but the
first author name dropped? E.g. we want:

(Smith, 1999, 2000) rather than (Smith, 1999, Smith 2000)

…?

How would we configure a style where the citations should be ordered as
they appear? What about numeric styles where the bibliography should
also be sorted by appearance order?

Bruce

Seems reasonable.

Just to make sure, how we would we configure a style like APA,
where we
also wanted the citation sorted author-date, and we wanted all but the
first author name dropped? E.g. we want:

(Smith, 1999, 2000) rather than (Smith, 1999, Smith 2000)

…?

How would we configure a style where the citations should be
ordered as
they appear? What about numeric styles where the bibliography should
also be sorted by appearance order?

Just don’t add a tag.

Simon

Simon Kornblith wrote:

Seems reasonable.

Just to make sure, how we would we configure a style like APA,
where we
also wanted the citation sorted author-date, and we wanted all but the
first author name dropped? E.g. we want:

(Smith, 1999, 2000) rather than (Smith, 1999, Smith 2000)

…?

What does that (“collapse”) precisely mean then?

How would we configure a style where the citations should be
ordered as
they appear? What about numeric styles where the bibliography should
also be sorted by appearance order?

Just don’t add a tag.

Right, but what’s the attribute and its value?

Bruce