Re: [Refdb-users] Re: nitpicking (element ordering in risx)

[Bruce D'A. <bd...@fa...>]

On Nov 24, 2003, at 3:39 AM, Justus H. Piater wrote:

> May I join into the discussion:

Sure!

> Indeed, I am not sure what an input template would provide over and
> above psgml-mode.

It gets to your later question about editor.  It allows you to present 
to the user a more context-specific and unambiguous prompt for entry.  
For example, I have created a template called book-edited, which has a 
prompt to enter "editor."  When the user enters that, it goes in the 
"author" field.

I will post later so you can see for yourself.

> Even better, one could convert the DTD to RELAX NG and use it with
> nxml-mode which does XML validation.

I've been known to argue this.  IMHO, Relax NG is a big leap beyond 
DTDs in both elegance and power, and nxml mode is simple excellent.

But Markus very much wants to maintain compatibility with SGML, so has 
been more reluctant.  Still, it's trivial to convert RISX to RNG with 
Trang.

I'll let Markus answer some of your detail questions.

> - Is there really no established standard for representing references
>   in XML? By TEI, for example, or something linked to the Dublin
>   Core...

No.  My opinion is the new MODS schema from the Library of Congress is 
the most likely to provide this, however.

> And what is the relation of RIS/RISX/RefDB to Bibliofile?

Markus is involved in development discussions of Bibliofile, as am I.  
It is an xslt-based formatting engine designed to be 
DTD/schema-independent, both with respect to bib data and document 
format.  Noone has done this before, so it's bleeding edge, and Markus 
is still skeptical it will work adequately.  I really hope it does, and 
that RefDB can use it as its formatting engine too.  Absent that, 
bibliofile also includes a style specification DTD that can handle 
MODS, and which Markus is interested in too.

> Another issue: I'd like the "master" representation of my references
> to be an XML file rather than a data base because that allows me to
> choose and change the format as desired. To make this practical, it
> would really help if RefDB could optionally identify references by the
> citekey instead of by the numeric ID. This would allow me to store
> references from different sources in the same RefDB database, and to
> update some of them by re-importing manually maintained XML files.

I'm not following here.  RefDB stores the citekey; what more do you 
need it to do?

Bruce