Hi, On 11 October 2012 13:43, Bruce D'Arcus <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 6:25 AM, Carles Pina <[email protected]> wrote: > > ... > >> We chose these tasks after reading and summarising support queries to >> Mendeley support (I think that it's quite aligned with the Zotero's >> forum questions). We found that the majority of the requests says "I >> want this style but with this small change" (because some particular >> need) or "This style has this problem, how can I fix it?". >> >> I don't think that the CSL Editor is useful to create styles from the >> scratch (I hope that with the current number of styles no one will >> think a completely new approach to cite!), and probably it's not very >> useful to do major changes to the styles. > > Wouldn't you agree, then, that this research suggests that a > productive next step for developers to explore would be something > higher-level to capture both of these classes of use cases: the simple > minor change in formatting, and the more radical "major changes" > (though I'm skeptical these actually exist when you consider the full > range of extant styles)?
Some thoughts about creating styles from the scratch and the non-existing editor that facilities this task: My *personal* opinion (I'd be happy if someone proves that I'm wrong!): CSL is so complex and so rich that an editor to create styles from the scratch without knowing some advanced CSL concepts (macros, choose, variables, types) cannot be done... or, at least, I don't see at the moment how can be done. Again, I may be wrong. We could build tools that may help someone to create styles from the scratch. For example, and we mentioned it here some time ago, based in re-using existing macros (e.g. list all the available macros in the repository, allow the user to re-use macros easily). But I don't see a way to start with an empty style and easily and friendly without understanding what happens internally build a style. I don't think also that this is a common use case that we should tackle now (perhaps some years ago yes). I know different attempts to do a graphical programming language (e.g. http://code.google.com/p/blockly/?redir=1 , and others). It helps to explain programming to people, but I don't see people using it too much. I know that it's a different scope, but I hope that it helps to explain my thoughts. Somehow it would be like building a Python/any programming language user interface. It can be done, but if you want to build things from the scratch you really need to understand what's underneath... tools helps, IDEs helps, but doesn't avoid of studying the programming language. (another way of thinking: lot of people doesn't agree that there is a good HTML editor. Lot of money and time has been invested in HTML editors and not everyone is satisfied. Recently it seems that the most common approach is to create tools like BaseKit -http://www.basekit.com- that offers different templates and then the users changes the templates. This is the way to go with getting macros together, and I still have doubts that this would work well enough). Regards, -- Carles Pina | Software Engineer http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/Carles-Pina/ Mendeley Limited | London, UK | www.mendeley.com Registered in England and Wales | Company Number 6419015 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ xbiblio-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xbiblio-devel
