Re: [xsl] citation processing

Subject: Re: [xsl] citation processing
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 12:32:28 -0400
At 11:19 AM 10/20/2006, you wrote:
Surely no one writes that stuff by hand, didn't it always start out life
marked up in a citation database like bibtex or endnote or something?
So if you can get hold of the original source life is much easier...

Actually it gets written by hand all the time, or more likely formatted by hand by a designer in a publishing house working in Quark or InDesign or (yikes) PageMaker, or converted by hand out of some word processing format.


Bruce D'Arcus was working for some time on generalized processing for citations: see his blog at

http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/

(Dunno if Bruce is still reading XSL-List.)

and also
http://microformats.org/wiki/citation

One of the besetting problems with citations is that people are commonly under the impression that they are much more systematic and regular than they actually are in real life. ("People" often includes institutions here.) This gets mixed up with ethical imperatives -- "if it isn't systematic it should be!" -- without real understanding of or sufficient sympathy for the complexities of the problem and the range of requirements that might actually or potentially be served by citations in a networked system (even if only implicitly networked like print).

This doesn't mean that the problem is completely intractable, just that it's harder than it looks, and that practical approaches usually work by breaking the problem up into parts in order to manage better the aspects of it that don't admit to comprehensive solutions.

Cheers,
Wendell

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