On Aug 20, 2004, at 6:22 PM, Michael Kay wrote:
You're heading towards a meta-stylesheet: a transformation written in
XSLT
that converts your abstract (or generic) stylesheet into a concrete
stylesheet. This is a perfectly feasible thing to do but you need to
think
very carefully about what you are trying to achieve.
The concrete issue is this:
There is no decent bibliographic formatting support in XML/XSLT
suitable for the needs of scholars in the humanities and social
sciences. This needs to change, or XML will never be a real alternative
for the vast majority of scholars who currently are stuck with the
duopoly of Word and Endnote.
At the same time, bibliographic formatting is difficult stuff,
demanding the flexibility to reliably handle literally thousands of
individual journal and publisher styles.
I don't think it's realistic to demand users and developers standardize
on only one document and bibliographic format. I prefer using DocBook
and MODS, others I've worked with prefer TEI, and still others
something else.
In short, and in an ideal world of course, I want to be able to use the
same core logic to format bibliographies and citations whether it is
for a TEI, DocBook, OpenOffice or even WordML document data, or with
different bibliographic metadata schema like MODS. I want the same
core formatter to read the same XML formatting style files.
The idea is analogous to BiblioX (itself analogous to bibtex), but I
feel like the core structure of that needs to be radically reworked,
and I don't have the skill to do that:
http://www.silmaril.ie/bibliox
Perhaps it's best to just keep working on the stylesheets for my own
needs and worry about configurability later, though.
Bruce
PS - Among other things, I'm the co-project lead for the OOoBib project
at OpenOffice, where we want to use XSLT to handle the formatting:
http://bibliographic.openoffice.org
--
Bruce D'Arcus, PhD
Miami University
216 Shideler Hall
Oxford, OH 45056
513-529-1521