Accommodating articles.

[Doug du Boulay <ddb@owari.msl.titech.ac.jp>]

I've been looking into using DocBook <article>s as a possible vehicle for
journal manuscripts. For the most part I think it has the
potential to be a good fit, but there are just a few issues which are 
troublesome. 

(1) There seems to be no <articleinfo> container to hold the name of 
    the journal in which the article has been or will be published. 
    This seemed an unusual oversight because <volume> <pages> <issue>
    <date> already exist.
    I guess it would be called <publication>. Ideally the  
    content model would contain a title or more often an 
    abbreviated title of the journal, Maybe both?

(2) It would be useful to have a formal <contact> element within    
    <authorgroup>, typically, but not always one of the authors 
    of the article. It would therefore need the same content 
    as <author>, but probably wouldn't be displayed by default.

(3) <authorgroup><author> needs to allow <footnote>
    The reason is that sometimes authors move on, to the afterlife or 
    new laboratories/positions and it is important and respectful 
    to note such things, but not within the main body of the article.
    Actually I noticed some publications put the complete author 
    address as a footnote, appropriately <footnoteref>'ed by other 
    authors from the same institution.

(4) It would be nice if there was some kind of generic inline <name> 
    container for denoting the names of books or journals or companies 
    or ... 
    Typically these are rendered in italics. But because they are names,
    <emphasis> isn't really appropriate. <phrase> seems too general and 
    may be overworked enough already. 
    <application> seems like a specific case of what probably
    aught to be <name role="program">

(5) It might be nice if the <equation>, <inlineequation> and 
    <informalequation> elements provided an @type attribute to 
    distinguish between mathematical and chemical equations/reactions 
    and formulae. Perhaps "math"|"chem"|"nuclear?" with a default of "math"?
    (actually, it would be very nice to be able to put text - punctuation
    such as a full-stop or comma at the very least - on the same line 
    as an <equation> or <informalequation> )

(6) The <supplement> thing for centralising embedded related data in 
    other XML dialects. 
 (see http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200507/msg00053.html)


Thats about it. What do you think?

Thanks
Doug