RE: [jats-list] Element for wrapping a group of xref elements

[GNU XML <gnu.xml@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 11:41 PM, Kaveh Bazargan <kaveh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On 31 January 2013 17:09, Alf Eaton <eaton.alf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 24 January 2013 16:26, Kaveh Bazargan <kaveh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > So in a very generic terminology, a citation to a reference should be:
> >
> > <reference>ref1, ref2, ref3, ref19, ref22, ref23, ref24</reference>
> >
> > with no regard for what the rendered output should look like.
>
> That's essentially the same as <xref rid="ref1 ref2 ref3 ref19 ref22
> ref23 ref24"/> - which would be ideal, but the problem is that most of
> the time we're marking up cross-references in text that already
> contains punctuation, e.g.
> (<xref rid="ref1">Smith, 1999</xref>; <xref rid="ref2">Jones, 2003</xref>)
>
> To be able to reformat those references using numeric reference labels
> instead of author-year, there has to be some way of knowing where the
> punctuation starts and ends, so either:

[...]

>
> Not sure I quite understand, but my argument is that we don't really
> need "labels" at all. If references are correctly structured,
> identifying the author, year, etc, then we choose at "run-time"
> whether to have numeric or author-year labels in the text. We can of
> course put a default label in, but in principle one output would
> automatically give:
>
> (Smith, 1999; Jones, 2003)
>
> and another:
>
> [18, 25]
>
> and of course any "contraction" can be automatically generated too, e.g.
>
> [18, 2225, 27, 3337]


Real life, situations are not as simple as the ones listed above. See
instances like,

(Smith, 1999)   => author, year -- parenthetical citation
Smith (1999)   => author (year) -- textual
Smith  => author name alone cited
1999  => year alone cited

(Smith, 1999a,b) => two citations of the author in the same year

Smith, Jones, Jefferson, Edison, Newton (1999) => all author names
Smith et al (1999) => another variant of the same citation

Smith [3] => In numeric scheme, author names are also cited and quite common

In cross references of equations, theorems and theorem like
environments, there are myriad instances that evade automatic and
straight forward generation of labels in body text. I won't say it is
impossible, but the resources spent on will be disproportionate and
often not fun.

More importantly, we are forgetting the vital aspect of freedom of
author to communicate in the way he wants it to happen. XML is to
assist the author and not that authors should play to the conveniences
of XML or technologies.

Cheers