On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Rintze Zelle <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Bruce D'Arcus <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> > - type-based approach meant styles were kind of brittle (every type
>> > needed to be fully-specified for formatting to work correctly)
>>
>> This issue is more apparent to users in the social sciences,
>> humanities, and law, which typically cite a far wider array of
>> document types. If you only cite journal articles and books (which
>> have very regular data as well), then this weakness isn't as apparent.
>>
>> But it's a PITA otherwise.
>
>
> I don't want to go off-topic, but I think that with CSL 1.0 we sometimes
> still need item-type based conditionals. After removing the fallback
> behavior we had in CSL 0.8.1, where sub-item types like "report" would also
> test true when the test was for "book", we got stuck with many styles with
> conditionals like:
>
> <else-if type="bill book graphic legal_case motion_picture report song
> manuscript speech" match="any">
>
> (I took this from http://www.zotero.org/styles/apa)
>
> I don't see a very easy solution for this, unless we clearly define in CSL
> what roles the different item types fulfill, and what fields belong to each
> item type. That might make it easier to create conditionals that test on the
> presence of certain fields that still work consistently between the
> different CSL-supporting apps (Zotero, Mendeley, Papers, etc.).
I have a hunch that one could simplify the above code by testing on
the lack of presence of a certain variable.
My point here is not to argue about whether types are ever needed;
it's to point out a limitation of requiring types for formatting to
work at all (which is the case in Endnote; it has a "generic" type
template, but then everything else is separate, no code reuse, etc.).
> There might
> be other ways to improve the situation, but I perceive this issue as one of
> the main weaknesses of CSL 1.0.
Exactly what is the weakness though? That we removed fallback behavior
and thus require this? If that's the case, then it's easy enough to
recreate fallback logic using variables. The design of fallback
behavior basically said:
if container-title, then:
if publisher, then:
type = chapter
else
type = article
else:
type = book
Easy enough to represent in CSL 1.0.
Bruce
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