Re: [Refdb-users] MODS + RefDB

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

On Feb 5, 2004, at 3:18 PM, Markus Hoenicka wrote:

> Just for the record: RefDB does not support extended citations because
> so far DocBook (and the other supported types, for that matter) had no
> means to code them in your documents.

For the record, yes, Markus is right; the limitation is across the 
board in XML document formats, and not Markus' fault.

At one level I find this surprising, given that citations ought to be 
exactly the sort of thing that XML (and XSLT) should excel at; the kind 
of thing for which these standards were designed.  OTOH, when you 
consider that free software hackers are very rarely scholars, it starts 
to make sense ;-)

> There was simply no possibility to support it without resorting to 
> ridiculous hacks.

This is only if you accept the need to keep strictly to the DTD, and 
not to use any customization layers.  DocBook was always conceived as 
an interchange format; not strictly a complete solution.  It would have 
been possible to implement biblioref quite apart from the TC and then 
have a stylesheet that converted the elements to xrefs for 
interchange...

Still, the issue is moot now that we'll finally have this added to 
DocBook and, hopefully, OpenOffice.  I'm still unclear if TEI needs 
this or not.  A quick chat with Sebastian Rahtz seems to suggest it 
does, but Peter seemed to be saying otherwise.  Would be nice to come 
to a conclusion on this.

Bruce