Re: [Bibulus-dev] Bibulus DTD: An concrete example

[Thomas Widmann]

Torsten Bronger <address@hidden> writes:

> "Marius L. Jøhndal" <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Not true. It's about formalism. Publishers and magazines sometimes
>> have quite strict guidelines about these things.
>
> If the guidelines are really that strict, you will run into trouble
> with non-hand-corrected BibTeX data anyway.  There are just too many
> things with different opinions about.  The only clean solution is
>
> <city>
>   <cityname xml:lang="de">München</cityname>
>   <cityname>Munich</cityname>
> </city>

Not a good idea, since all the names of every city would have to be
repeated again and again.

> <city refid="de/Munich">
>
> with an appropriate city data base entry.

Better, but <city country="de">München</city> would be better since it
would provide a sensible fall-back if it wasn't mentioned in the city
database.

> Both is unrealistic in my opinion, and unnecessary.

We'll know more about realism soon, but it *is* necessary.

>>> There is one thing however that needs to be canonicalised, namely
>>> the journal name (if it's a paper).
>>
>> So how is this case really any different? If canonicalisation can
>> be done here -- using the "official spelling", I would assume --
>> it surely can be accomplished for names of *major* cities.
>
> I believe that this is unrealistic.  You would have to enforce a
> large list of names, possibly even a matrix of city names because
> e.g. Russians want their Cyrillic and want to be able to write
> something like <city xml:lang="ru">NYC in Cyrillic</city>.

Normally one would expect people to enter the city name in the same
language as the title.  It would then be up to Bibulus to transform
   <title>Индоевропейский язык и индоевропейцы</title>
   <city country="ge">Тифлис</city>
into "Индоевропейский язык и индоевропейцы, Тифлис, Грузия" for a
Russian bibliography, "Indoyevropeyskiy yazyk i indoyevropeycy,
Tbilisi, Georgia" for an English one, and "Indojewropejskij jasyk i
indojewropejzy, Tiflis, Georgien" for a German one.

> A lot of discipline that the users must show for a rather small
> benefit in my opinion.  So eventually people will just write the
> city names,

Which is why we must design a DTD which is easy for people to
understand and use.

> and the DTD must even live with people writing <city>Heidelberg,
> Berlin, New York</city>.

Oh yes, I forgot about that.  We have to expand the DTD to deal with
that.

> For journals however there are already lists with official
> abbreviations available for decades.

Do you have any good links to such lists?  It would be nice to add
them if possible.

/Thomas
-- 
Thomas Widmann          Bye-bye to BibTeX: join the Bibulus project now!
address@hidden                                <http://www.bibulus.org>
Glasgow, Scotland, EU     <http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/bibulus/>