Re: [xsl] variable question

Subject: Re: [xsl] variable question
From: Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 17:12:11 -0500
Jeni wondered:

Looking again, I'm confused about what you're trying to do. Do you
want $bibrecord to hold a sequence of all the documents whose paths
are bib-data/X.mods where X is the value of the linkend of a
<biblioref> within your document?

... and Mike followed up:


I can't correct it for you because it's not clear to me what you meant to
write.

Let me step back and *try* (it's not easy) to explain the larger issue I'm trying to address, which goes back to some previous posts.


I need to format citations and bibliographies. The citations are in the document, and consist of pointers to a bibliographic records, identified with an ID attribute.

In my first cut at the stylesheets, I basically processed the citations and the bibliographies separately, and assumed the bibliographic data was embedded in the document. This isn't very generalizable as a) formatting really needs to be driven by the citation, and b) in many cases, the source bib data is not going to be in the document.

The concrete example is this:

1) I need to format citations as footnotes, and to distinguish between first occurrence in the text (a full citation), and subsequent (a shortened form).

2) I want to integrate this all into an XML DB, where the XML bib data is residing in a collection separate from the document source. Or, alternately, I want to store the bib data in a flat file database apart from the document source.

In the first case, then, the formatting of the citation depends on where each citation reference is in relation to others. In the second, I need to be able to access those external bib elements and to work with them as a group (for example, to do grouping and sorting and so forth of that data).

Does that make any more sense? As I said, I find it difficult to explain.

Bruce

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