On 11/10/05, Bruce D'Arcus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
> I'm not following you above Dave (the xforms thing has me stumped),
I am viewing xforms simply as a means of obtaining either user selection
(of styles, content or other relevent choices) in an XML format.



but
> there ARE three bits. User experience would be:

<snip/> I *think* we are close to viewing the end to end similarly;
remember I'm not a citation user in any significant way.
Just trying to bring another perspective.



> There are a variety of issues here. Does user choose citation style
> apart from document template styling?
Ask users what they want?
Could it be a selection via a 'menu' from a set of options?
(or an entry on an X-form)


  I could imagine a menu item with
> the citation styles, for example, so that user just changes with a
> change of menu item. In fact, as a user I would prefer that.
I'd guess that's the hat you need to put on Bruce, now that
you have a working system.
  What would users prefer?


>
> Related, you have to understand the larger styling issues here.  There
> are literally thousands of bibliographic styles out there.
Yes, I've seen some.

 Every
> journal and book publisher basically has their own.  With the Word
> plug-in Endnote, they have an online repository of citation styles that
> numbers over 1000, and the user can just download them. But they're
> closed binary files.
That's where common sense says forget minorities, and look to
the pareto (if there is one). What styles will hit a majority, or
can you style it 'basically', then make it easy for the fussy user
to tweak it to their own niche style?



>
> We can change this because my style language is XML, and because OD
> itself is XML.  So while I could imagine downloading a complete OD
> template file that defined citation formatting too from some website
> (say a publisher's), I could also imagine separately downloading
> citation styles (ideally via web service access).

If the styling really is, and needs to be, that flexible, how much work would it
be to provide a schema and let a user give you an xml specification of
the styling?
  If it's valid to your schema, you could use that to style it?
Is that bending over too far backwards?

regards

--
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk

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