[uf-discuss] Easy book citations

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On 7/30/06, Simon Cozens <simon at simon-cozens.org> wrote:
> Bruce D'Arcus:
> > >BibTeX - but that is because "author", "title" and "book" are pretty
> > >obvious names for the things they describe. :)
> >
> > [ Something about a problem ]
> >
> > OTOH, if you just have a single title structure and allow it to
> > include an additional class attribute to qualify it (like "container"
> > or "publication"), problem solved.
>
> I do, yes. There wasn't a problem to be solved. :) My format looks like
>
>     <div class="book">
>         <span class="title"> Foo </span>
>     </div>
>
> BibTeX has
>
>     @Book{Thingy,
>         title = { Foo }
>     }
>
> Looks rather similar. But I didn't design it that way consciously because of
> BibTeX - I designed it that way because it seemed to be the simplest and most
> obvious way of doing it.

No, books per se are the easiest things in the world ot model, and
it's hard to ever find an argument about this one.

The examples I am referring to -- and which start to show difficulty
-- are thiings like parts (chapters) within books. If you encode the
title for the book as <span class="publication title">Book
Title</span> (or use "container" instead of "publication"), then
great!

If, OTOH, you insist on <span class="book-title">Book Title</span>
(e.g. a single class attribute, a la BibTeX) then I'm afraid I'll have
to fight you tooth-and-nail ;-)

> Perhaps the authors of BibTeX thought so too. :)

I'll be blunt: BibTeX is a hack. It was written by a scientist (no
consideration of the needs of humanities or social sciences people)
before the internet, before unicode, widely available relational
databases, before XML, etc, and it shows.

Bruce