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

[Torsten Bronger]

Halloechen!

Thomas Widmann <address@hidden> writes:

> Torsten Bronger <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> [...]
>>
>> Is there any way to avoid creating a list of city names, at least
>> for the most important, say, 50?  I don't see any.
>
> No.  But I think it's important to note that the list probably
> will be different from language to language.

Okay.  And where and how are the lists hosted?

> [...]
>
>> It needn't be an XML database, a mere list should be enough.  But
>> it must become part of the standard.
>
> [...]

I withdraw my statement: They should be XML in order to allow for
automatic generation of the lists for the documentation, and maybe
for the semit-automatic generation of XSLT/Perl/Whatever code for
applying them, too.

> [...]
>
>> *or* they have to write "Moscow".
>
> Personally, I dislike falling back to English.  It's bad enough
> that tags have to be in a particular language.

I dislike that too, but the heuristics involved in finding the
proper language are dangerous.  If the whole entry, or the whole
bibliography has an xml:lang="ru" the author can (must) write Moscow
in Cyrillic.

> [...]
>
> Plenty of cities wouldn't have American English variants.  Let me
> propose another way to deal with it:
>
> [...]
>
> Another example (with fewer explanations):
>
> XML: <city country="ie" xml:lang="da">Dublin</city>
> Internal: -> Baile Átha Cliath/ie/ga
> German context: -> Dublin
>
> Does that make sense?

Yes, but it is more about the implementation rather than the
standard itself (the file format).  The question is how to deal with
tags when no xml:lang is set at all.  I'd suggest American English,
since this seems to be an unwritten law in XML.  If there is no
English name for the city, well, then you have to use xml:lang.

>> My father, editor of a journal, told me that the abbreviations are
>> the same even in journals of different publishers (which would be
>> enough).  I hope the same is true for the full names of the
>> journals.  I will look for this on the Internet.

Unfortunately I've failed to find one list, or a list of links to
such lists.  But there are dozens of such abbreviation lists for
special topics, e.g. geographical journals.  They are
publisher-independent.

Things like the "citation index" can only work with standardised
names, so I think we can take them for granted for our
considerations here.  The only critical thing is whitespace in the
abbreviation.

Tschoe,
Torsten.

-- 
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus