Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
So exactly what is the process by which this gets resolved? Is there one?
Hixie will respond to substantive emails sent to this list at some
point. However there are some hundreds of outstanding emails (see [1])
so the responses can take a while. If you have a pressing deadline that
would benefit from your issue being addressed sooner, I suggest you talk
to Hixie about it.
FWIW I have a few general thoughts about the bibtex section which may or
may not be interesting:
1) It seems like this and similar sections (bibtex, vCard, iCalendar)
could be productively split out of the main spec into separate normative
documents, since they are rather self-contained and have rather obvious
interest for communities who are unlikely to find them at present or to
be interested in the rest of the spec. Although the drag and drop stuff
being dependent on them does mean that you'd need some circular references.
2) For the bibliographic data the most important issues that I see are
ease of use and ease of export. Although I am not attached to the bibtex
format per-se I would be extremely disappointed if a different, harder
to author, format were used. Formats that are flexible but rarely used
are less useful overall than more limited formats with ubiquitous
deployment. In addition formats that are hard to use make it more likely
that people will make accidental mistakes, so decreasing the reliability
of the data and devaluing tools that consume the data.
Although I don't think we have to use bibtex as the basis for the
format, I do think a canonical mapping to bibtex is a requirement.
Obviously this reflects my background in the physical sciences but, at
least in that field LaTeX and, by association, bibtex are overwhelmingly
popular. I am well aware that the situation in other fields is different
but without clean, high fidelity, bibtex export (at least to the extend
required to support common citation patterns within the physical
sciences) the format will lose out on a large audience with a higher
than average number of potential early adopters.
[1] http://www.whatwg.org/issues/data.html
On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Bruce D'Arcus <bdar...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 5:35 PM, Ian Hickson <i...@hixie.ch> wrote:
...
I agree that BibTeX is suboptimal. But what should we use instead?
As I've suggested:
1) use Dublin Core.
This gives you the basic critical properties: literals for titles and
dates, and relations for versions, part/containers, contributors,
subjects.
You then have a consistent and general way to represent (HTML)
documents and embedded references to other documents, etc. (citation
references). This would cover the most important areas that BibTeX
covers.
2) this goes far, but you're then left with a few missing pieces for citations:
a. more specific contributors (like editors and translators)
b. identifiers (there's dc:identifier, but no way to explicitly denote
that it's a doi, isbn, issn, etc.)
c. what I call "locators"; volume, issue, pages, etc.
d. types (book, article, patent, etc.)
If there's some consensus on this basic way forward, we can talk about
details on 2.
Bruce
