Re: RefDB and Jurabib

Hi Doug,

Quoting doug <[email protected]>:

> I think it took me about a month of Sunday afternoons to assemble RefDB-lite,
> so I would really, really like to think that someone somewhere might actually
> find a use for this thing (if it couldn't be rolled into the RefDB
> distribution in some minor capacity?).
>

Thanks a lot for bringing this up again. I was admittedly not able to  
run some serious tests in the past to evaluate the code, but I'm sure  
this is a starting point for the raw bibliography formatting I was  
talking about. As for Jeremy's formatting requirements, he will  
probably not only have to fiddle with the XSLT, but also with RefDB's  
data model to include the additional fields which are not covered at  
the moment.

On the long run we'd have to reorganize the XSLT code in a way to  
create TEI as well as DocBook output. I'm sure these output formats  
can share code to some degree. A different story is SGML which I still  
have to support (in order to generate word processor compatible  
output) - this will require an entirely new implementation in DSSSL.

If we were able to refactor refdb-lite to do at least what the current  
RefDB code does, I'd be happy to roll it into the RefDB distribution  
in more than just a minor capacity. We should probably take our time  
and extend the code along with the extended data model that is  
supposed to be included in post-1.0 releases of RefDB.

It will probably take me as many Sunday afternoons to understand your  
code as it took you to write it. Would you be able to spend some more  
time in the future on this project?

One more thing. I noticed you had hacked a CGI script to retrieve  
references from RefDB on the fly. While I believe that it is always  
better to have the references as an XML file along with your document  
(only then you can validate it), RefDB 0.9.9 will have a SRU interface  
which allows retrieving datasets via an URL. refdb-lite could be  
changed to use the SRU interface for this purpose.

regards,
Markus


-- 
Markus Hoenicka
[email protected]
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de


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