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

[Kaveh Bazargan <kaveh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 1 February 2013 08:31, GNU XML <gnu.xml@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> [...]
>
> > 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, 22b25, 27, 33b37]
>
>
> 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
>

I do take your points, but I would say that most of these can be
auto-generated by putting an attribute in the XML, which is then
passed to the pagination system which generates the correct visual
output. See for instance the natbib package for TeX:

http://merkel.zoneo.net/Latex/natbib.php

I would also suggest that the traditional forms for citations are a
legacy of the print days. If most people are reading electronically
perhaps we should change the way we show refs in PDFs, because full
info can be obtained by hovering over the reference.

In any case at the very least we can put the correct labels for
author/year, as we are now, but have the option of creating numerical
refs instead.

>
> 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.
>

Well, if authors realised what they can gain by assisting the
production of a fully structured document (e.g. text mining, reading
by the blind), I think they perhaps they would be happy to lose a
little of tradition in prose... The problem is that most authors have
no idea of what can be done. Publishers don't help, by hiding their
XML in "archives", and not publishing them even to subscribers. ;-)


--
Kaveh Bazargan
www.river-valley.com | www.river-valley.tv | www.bazargan.org