Sorry, for my intrusion on this list. I realize that it's cheeky to
come to a list only to rant about a specific detail, but I feel that
more support for Bruce's position is needed. Just a bit about my
background: I don't have any technical training or expertise in
software or programming. I'm a scholar in humanities (film studies and
German literature) and wrote my PhD thesis in film studies using
LaTeX. Although I'm not a programmer by any means, I consider myself
an 'advanced user' and quote well informed in terms of bibliographic
software. There aren't a lot of bibliographic softwares or other
solutions I haven't had a look in the last couple of years.
After this introduction, let me just state one thing: To base any kind
of future software on BibTeX would be really like using ASCII instead
of UT8. Yes, it's really that bad. BibTeX is now almost 20 years old
and its shortcomings are well known and have been discussed endlessly.
It has an extremely limited model which basically only covers English
speaking sciences. As soon as you leave this area (like I have to do
daily), you're out of luck with traditional BibTeX. Sure, there are
all kind of extensions, but most of them are limited as well and none
of them is standardized. I just say ‘bookauthor’. Until recently, no
BibTeX supported this field, although it's really a basic thing for
humanities (Now, if anyone asks why you would need a 'bookauthor'
field, I have only one thing to answer: Find out what is needed in
different disciplines before settling on a standard).
It's a sad fact that the same mistakes are repeated over and over
again in the area of bibliographic software. It seems like a natural
law that every new software solution dealing with bibliographies
always has to start with an extremely limited set of fields like
BibTeX. It took nearly two decades until biblatex got rid of most of
the basic shortcomings of BibTeX, but somehow other projects don’t
seem to learn from this. It doesn't have to be this way. The problems
of the existing solutions are known, alternatives do exist. So please
hear my plea: Don't go with an ancient model whose shortcomings are
well known but use something modern instead. If you absolutely have to
use BibTeX, please use at least biblatex which covers most of the
problems of traditional BibTeX.
simon
--
Simon Spiegel
Steinhaldenstr. 50
8002 Zürich
Telephon: ++41 44 451 5334
Mobophon: ++41 76 459 60 39
http://www.simifilm.ch
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