Re: [jats-list] citation "year" with suffix

[Nikos Markantonatos <nikos@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Kaveh,

> I agree that for subjects with a lot of legacy citations which cannot
> easily be structured, mixed citation might be better, but for STM
> research where most refs are structured, I think that it would
> encourage more structure.

As others have argued already, <element-citation> would simply encourage 
more tag abuse and hidden encoding problems. <mixed-citation> only 
encodes whatever metadata is known for a citation and leaves everything 
else, including spacing and punctuation, unmarked. Clearly, we encourage 
XML creators to supply citations as fully marked up as possible, but 
there are practical reasons where this may not be possible.

> My preference is that at least for normal journal and book citation
> which has structure, the data should be pure, and devoid of textual
> embellishments like en-dashes and semi-colons. These can be put in by
> any intelligent renderer on the fly, and even produce the most
> beautiful typesetting.

Textual embellishments may appear to be less crucial than the citation 
metadata, yet they form an important part of an archival quality XML. 
Renderers, no matter how intelligent they are, will never be able to 
reinstate lost information. And this is because lost information is not 
consistent and there are always good reasons behind that. Over the years 
and over the course of dozens of legacy content migration projects, we 
have found monstrous implicit rules hidden behind the idea of 
maintaining "pure data". We had to apply reverse engineering techniques 
and inquire with people who had originally encoded the information.

Bottom line is that if you employed an intelligent renderer to display 
that content, it would be a multi-week effort for each case, custom 
built for each particular subset of content. I cannot believe that this 
is the idea behind an archival quality XML. Not unless you are willing 
to associate each complex renderer and store it along with the XML it 
corresponds to. But clearly, this goes against the original idea of 
storing all the information pertaining to an article in a single XML file.

Tags like <mixed-citation>, <string-name> and <string-date> offer the 
power to those who care to keep both the article structure and the 
associated display information in a single XML file. This, in turn, 
helps keep renderers simple and reusable across a vast variety of 
content. And I consider this capability to be one of the strongest 
assets of the NLM/JATS family of DTDs.

Best regards,
Nikos Markantonatos
Atypon


On 02/26/2013 05:24 PM, Kaveh Bazargan wrote:
> Hi Nikos
>
> I bow to the volume of data that you have in your organization, and my
> exposure to the variety of xml does not compare to yours. ;-)
>
> I agree that for subjects with a lot of legacy citations which cannot
> easily be structured, mixed citation might be better, but for STM
> research where most refs are structured, I think that it would
> encourage more structure. I would like us to try hard to make
> something structured and only use <comment> if there is no other
> option.
>
> Also I personally think that punctuation does not belong in data
> (unless there is no way of structuring). I believe that the Atypon DTD
> uses the x tag which makes it easy at least to remove the punctuation,
> but for me, putting the punctuation in verbatim in the data goes
> against the spirit of structure.
>
> My preference is that at least for normal journal and book citation
> which has structure, the data should be pure, and devoid of textual
> embellishments like en-dashes and semi-colons. These can be put in by
> any intelligent renderer on the fly, and even produce the most
> beautiful typesetting. But know there is plenty of "unintelligent"
> rendering engines out there that rely on a helping hand from
> typographic niceties peppered in the XML. If this is any part of the
> reason for leaving punctuation, then it worries me greatly.
>
> And just an example of how ridiculous mixed citation can get, here is
> an example from a recently published paper:
>
> <mixed-citation>
> US CDC 1990. International notes earthquake disaster: Luzon,
> Philippines. Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report 39(34): 573-577.
> </mixed-citation>
>
> This has arguably _less_ structure than a printed reference. The
> latter at least has bold and italic which hint at what each item might
> represent. ;-)


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