Re: Bibliographic styling

Hi Norm,

That’s too bad. 

For the moment, I think I’ll back into the project by creating a set of biblioentry tests based on the existing bibliographies in XML Press books (they are currently all in bibliomixed form) and a set of examples from a book called Cite Right, which is a guide to a variety of citation styles, including Chicago, MLA, APA, and a bunch of others.

In addition to having a good set of tests, that should also be a test to see if biblioentry is sufficient to express a wide range of types, especially newer forms that have evolved since biblioentry was created.

If you, or anyone on the mailing list, have examples that I could add, I’ll be glad to take them.

Dick
-------
XML Press
XML for Technical Communicators
http://xmlpress.net
[email protected]



> On May 25, 2020, at 01:05, Norman Tovey-Walsh <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Richard Hamilton <[email protected]> writes:
>> Is the following correct?
> 
> [ Not intending to speak for Peter… ]
> 
>> - CSL encodes the details of how a particular style works. It provides
>> a machine readable set of instructions that can be used by a processor
>> to generate output that follows a particular citation style.
> 
> Yep. 
> 
>> - To use CLS with DocBook, you could write a stylesheet that would
>> take a biblioentry and format it based on the contents of a particular
>> CSL file. You might do that as a pre-processor and convert biblioentry
>> into bibliomixed, or you could convert directly from biblioentry into
>> fo, html, etc.
> 
> Also, yep.
> 
>> - Or, at least for HTML, you could convert a biblioentry into CSL-JSON
>> and convert it to HTML with citeproc-js or pandoc-citeproc. I haven’t
>> tried out citeproc-js or pandoc-citeproc, so I could be way off on
>> this one.
> 
> That might actually be the only short-term practical solution. I’ve
> filed a few bugs on the CSL spec and its test suite. Near as I can tell,
> what actually exists is a reference implementation (citeproc-js) and a
> specification that only incompletely describes the behavior of that
> implementation.
> 
> I still might poke at a DocBook+CSL to HTML stylesheet, but my
> enthusiasm as waned significantly. A third party implementation of CSL
> is going to fail tests in the test suite. The specification is not going
> to reflect why those tests *should* pass, and the only recourse is going
> to be to reverse engineer the citeproc-js implementation (either
> literally or by making something that’s bug-compatible; in as much as I
> assert that an implementation that doesn’t conform to the specification
> is buggy). Kind of disappointing, really.
> 
>                                        Be seeing you,
>                                          norm
> 
> --
> Norman Tovey-Walsh <[email protected]>
> https://nwalsh.com/
> 
>> The common excuse of those who bring misfortune on others is that they
>> desire their good.--Vauvenargues