On Jul 16, 2006, at 10:23 PM, pt wrote:
1. An external reference database / research tool that could be used
with
both Word and Writer. It should be able to store not jsut metadata but
full-text articles, notes, webpage snapshots & other supporting data.
Right. I think this is slowly being taken care of by others. The
Firefox Scholar plug-in (aka SmartFox), for example, is likely to be
really good, and will be free (GPL). They also have interest in serving
as data sources for word-processors.
I am still not convinced that storing reference details with a
document is a
good idea; the biggest reason is that even if interop can be sorted
out this
will still only work with Word 2007 and a future version of Writer.
Why? I'm pretty sure there must be a way to store that data in earlier
versions of the apps. Apps like Endnote, for example, have been
embedding data in Word docs for years. It's just never been
standardized.
In our case, in any case, we're not dependent on embedded data; it's a
convenience. I think Microsoft, by contrast, is dependent on it.
The difference is that I'll be pushing to ensure that the identifiers
for citations are uris, where we recommend best practices to make it
easy to reconstitute data as needed. MS, by contrast, is using dumb
local natural language ids for linking. E.g. they always assume the
data is embedded.
2. An external CSL editor that can export compiled XSLT for Word - and
maybe
Python code for Writer. (I don't agree with Bruce that this needs to
be
built in to Word or that the size of XSLT files is a problem since they
would be auto-generated from a CSL file).
The code to generate static XSLTs of this sort is not easy to write,
and it makes everything more, not less, complex, doesn't it? For
example, how do styles get stored, and how would a user add a style?
What happens if you need to update a style?
CSL is simple enough that it's really not hard to write a parser for
it. The SmartFox guys will be doing just that using Javascript (E4X to
be specific, which has XML extensions).
3. Interoperable citation markers that will allow cross-word-processor
teams to work together.
Microsoft are clearly not going to be swayed by lobbying, and it's not
clear
to me how much Sun will do to push this stuff through.
MS won't be swayed to do the right thing aside from what's in their own
interest. I am trying to point out to them where those overlap (for
example, they don't support footnotes within the citation fields; am
making sure that's not a file format restriction, which would be bad
for them too), and am optimistic interop will be fairly good.
FWIW, MS is using standard field support to implement the coding for
citations.
As for OOo and Sun, I think we need at minimum to get the new citation
field implemented and exposed so that projects like your's and
Matthias' can easily interest with it.
Why not concentrate on building stand-alone tools that work with the
current installed base of
word processing software? That is, build a better EndNote.
I agree.
(That's what I hope my team will be doing over the coming year - in
alignment with the work going on here)
Cool. You should hook up with the SmartFox guys. They'll be releasing a
beta sometime in the next few months, complete with support for CSL and
the biblio schema I've been working on ;-).
Bruce
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