Re: [Refdb-users] MODS + RefDB

[Markus H. <mar...@mh...>]

Bruce D'Arcus writes:
 > 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 ;-)
 > 

You also have to consider that DocBook was developed by CS people. For
them, the existing citation support is obviously good enough.

 > > 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...
 > 

This is true, but I've figured in the very beginning that RefDB would
only have a chance if it works with the stock DTDs. As soon as
end-users have to fiddle with customized DTDs, things get murky, not
to talk about the interchange issues created by non-standard
DTDs. Therefore I always made sure it works with DocBook as the TC
created it.

 > 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.
 > 

I think this depends on how TEI is being used. It was designed to
capture existing documents in an SGML/XML format. It was not
specifically designed to write documents from scratch, although you
can certainly do this. The former use does not need better citation
support. The latter does, but I have no idea how many people use TEI
to write from scratch.

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
mar...@ca...
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