Re: [xsl] citation processing

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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