Carlos asked:
> Can you give an example of how would I use this bibliography support
> for an
> APA style paper? For an MLA paper? I'm trying to understand the
> proposal but
> I don't think I'm being successful.
If you look at successful existing bibliographic applications, they
essentially involve:
1) a method to place a pointer to a bibliographic record within the
document
2) a formatting engine that picks out those pointers and assembles
formatted bibliographic entries and citations
3) a style file that feeds 2
The end result is that one can easily format and reformat papers,
seamlessly switching styles at will.
This is the approach in commercials applications like Endnote and
Reference Manager (which embed xml-like markup in Word fields), and in
BibTeX (which creates an external file which the source citation merely
points to).
This specific RFE only addresses 1 above. It only addresses the
functionality of the citation pointer itself.
Bottom line: if you do any work in the social sciences -- even if you
are an undergraduate student -- you are expected to be able to have
formatted citations like this:
multiple reference citations, like (Smith, 1999; Jones, 2000)
page number captions for quotes and such, like (Doe, 2003:33-4)
etc., etc.
DocBook does not support this functionality. Our proposal simply seeks
to change this.
As for the second and third on my list above, the three of us are
working on this as well ;-)
See this if you're interested:
http://silmaril.ie/bibliofile/
XML-based style DTD + DTD/Shema-independent XSLT-based formatting.
Bruce
PS - There's actually a fourth issue: the metadata model.
