#768: BibFormat: support non-HTML output modes easier (a simple tag?)
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Reporter: jblayloc | Owner:
Type: enhancement | Status: new
Priority: major | Milestone:
Component: BibFormat | Version:
Resolution: | Keywords:
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Comment (by jcaffaro):
Some quick comments that I don't have time to develop too much:
1. BibFormat is agnostic to the way its output is used: in an HTML page,
as raw text, XML, etc. It is already up to the format maintainer to
specify if the output should be HTML-escaped or not for example. So you
could add the proposed tags, but it would be other modules calling
BibFormat (for eg. WebSearch) to make use of this tag, depending on the
context.
2. Note that currently the role of specifying the content-type is left to
the ''output format'' (.bfo) instead of the ''format template'' (.bft). It
seemed to make more sense to have it here, since a BibTeX output would
remain ''text/plain'' whenever it deals with a foo (foo.bft) or a bar
(bar.bft).
3. BibFormat configuration files are designed to deal with individual
records, not group of records (one .bft formats one record). One template
represents the output of a single record (this really easier when creating
template than when you have to think about a list of records, as with
XSL). This is probably a bigger issue than what you described above to
adopt .bft for atom feeds for example. Note also that having per-record
formatting enables the following when searching: WebSearch retrieves list
of records, and ask BibFormat to format the first one, write to the page
(and send back to user), ask BibFormat to format second one, write to the
page (and send back to user), ask BibFormat to format third one, etc.
Still what seems to really miss in this case is the ability to specify a
prefix, a suffix and a separator for each ''output format'': these are
currently hard-coded in WebSearch, while the output formats could know
about it. Each output format would link to a ''prefix.bft'',
''suffix.bft'' and ''separator.bft'' in addition to the ''contents.bft''
files. Still it ''might'' be that in some cases the prefix must have
access to some context that would potentially not be available from the
BibFormat environment.
4. Note that .bft can already be used for atom feed. We use an .xsl by
default but a .bft would do.
5. Note that there are some developments possibly going into the direction
of this ticket in ticket:720
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Ticket URL: <http://invenio-software.org/ticket/768#comment:2>
Invenio <http://invenio-software.org>
