At 11:19 AM 10/20/2006, you wrote:
Surely no one writes that stuff by hand, didn't it always start out life
marked up in a citation database like bibtex or endnote or something?
So if you can get hold of the original source life is much easier...
Actually it gets written by hand all the time, or more likely
formatted by hand by a designer in a publishing house working in
Quark or InDesign or (yikes) PageMaker, or converted by hand out of
some word processing format.
Bruce D'Arcus was working for some time on generalized processing for
citations: see his blog at
http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/
(Dunno if Bruce is still reading XSL-List.)
and also
http://microformats.org/wiki/citation
One of the besetting problems with citations is that people are
commonly under the impression that they are much more systematic and
regular than they actually are in real life. ("People" often
includes institutions here.) This gets mixed up with ethical
imperatives -- "if it isn't systematic it should be!" -- without
real understanding of or sufficient sympathy for the complexities of
the problem and the range of requirements that might actually or
potentially be served by citations in a networked system (even if
only implicitly networked like print).
This doesn't mean that the problem is completely intractable, just
that it's harder than it looks, and that practical approaches usually
work by breaking the problem up into parts in order to manage better
the aspects of it that don't admit to comprehensive solutions.
Cheers,
Wendell
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