Hi, (I'm new here. I work for the University of Southern Queenland on an Australian government funded project to do with repositories, and on an open source content management system for courseware, which is tightly integrated with OpenOffice.org. More about those another time.)
I have a couple of comments/questions about CSL. 1. Will there be conditional logic required? Eg if element a exists then output b,c else output d. This sort of thing makes a CSL GUI very hard to design. (Do we really need a GUI? for citiation and bibliography formats most users will be consumers of preset formats, not creators.) 2. What are the chances of getting it into OpenDocument in a political sense? I have no idea about what would be involved but I can imagine it could be hard work, and difficult to get heard. This is only an idea, but both of these considerations made me think of leveraging XSLT. If there is a need for conditional elements, then we could use XSLT's xsl:if and xsl:choose, rather than inventing new machinery - ie add if and choose to CSL and be guaranteed of easy implementation using XSLT. And it also occurred to me that maybe it would be possible to ship XSLT with an OD document. So instead of including a CSL spec, one could ship an XSLT derived from a CSL spec that would operate on the content. So OOo would not have to know about CSL, just have a mechanism for running an XSLT stylesheet across the content of a document to produce a new version. Obviously there would need to be some conventions for feeding in bibliographic data for it to work upon and OD should still know about citations and bibliographies, just not the styling language. XSLT plugins would be a mechanism that might have other uses. In our publishing system, for example I'd love to be able to ship an XSLT stylesheet that would normalize a document by removing unwanted formatting and rationalizing lists. Note this is just an idea I'm floating, a mechanism for implementing CSL. CSL seems like a great idea to me, I'm *not* saying we should simply use XSLT instead. Peter Sefton On 10/4/05, Bruce D'Arcus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I've been talking to the OpenDocument people about the possibility of > including the citation style language (CSL) I designed in OpenDocument > in some form. > > http://xbiblio.sourceforge.net/csl.html > > One issue they raised is that it doesn't really make use of the OD > styling infrastructure. So I've been experimenting a bit with what it > might mean to bring them closer in line. > > Basically, it would primarily mean moving a lot of element content into > attributes. This fragment, for example, is about 75% more compact than > my current schema, and more in line with an OD approach: > > <names initialize-with="." and-as=" &"/> > <months jan="Jan" feb="Feb" mar="Mar" apr="Apr" may="May" jun="Jun" > jul="Jul" aug="Aug" sep="Sep" oct="Oct" nov="Nov" dec="Dec"/> > <locator unit="page" use-when="missing-volume-issue" single="p. " > multiple="pp. "/> > <locator unit="paragraph" single="� " multiple="�� "/> > <role term="editor" single="Ed. " multiple="Eds. "/> > <role term="translator" single="tran. " multiple="trans. "/> > <genre term="dissertation" value="PhD Dissertation"/> > <genre term="letter" value="letter"/> > <genre term="press release" value="press release"/> > <genre term="memo" value="memo"/> > <medium term="cdrom" value="CD-ROM"/> > > OK, so it's a lot more compact (and probably faster to process as a > result). What we give up with this approach is any possibility to add > markup to attribute content. So for example, current OOo code to > handle prefixes and suffixes for citations is handled in attributes. > Hence, they can only ever be strings effectively. > > Is that a reasonable tradeoff? How much of a compromise would it be > worth it to get this into the OD file format? > > And thinking about the document I posted the other day, how would > people imagine configuring the styling for the example which has: > > author name > ... citation 1 ... > .... citation 2 ... > > In other words, how would you see configuring a GUI such that you > indicate that a) citations should be grouped by author, and b) that the > group ought to be labeled with the author name, followed by a paragraph > break? It might have bearing on the above. > > Bruce > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -- Peter (pt) Sefton Toowoomba 4350 Queensland, Australia Phone: +61 4 1032 6955 Web: http://ptsefton.com Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
