[uf-discuss] Re: X2C (Was Citation Microformat: Lazyweb...)

[Michael McCracken]

...
>
> This isn't valid bibtex for three reasons:
> It's missing a key, a type, and the double-quotes around "HPC" are a
> syntax error.
>
> In bibtex you can enclose the fields in braces or double-quotes. I
> prefer braces, because then you don't need to worry about
> latex-escaping double-quotes inside the fields. (And many consumers of
> bibtex will still choke on even properly escaped double-quotes).
>
> For the missing elements, we should decide whether or not it's a
> SHOULD (so X2C needs a reasonable default) or a MUST, where I need to
> find a way to get that data in there.
>
> I think key/id and type (not format) are both SHOULDs.

Here I forgot to mention what the reasonable defaults for BibTeX should be.

In case of a missing type, 'misc' is appropriate. Any contiguous
sequence of letters is fine syntatically for a bibtex type, but spaces
are bad, for example "@Journal Article{foo, ...}" is invalid.

In case of a missing key/uid - using something unique to the page is fine.
Doing something unique and meaningful is better, like Author1YearTitle
(e.g. "Suda06Microformats"), like this:
@misc{suda06Microformats, author = {Suda, Brian}, Title ="Microformats"}

-mike

-- 
Michael McCracken
UCSD CSE PhD Candidate
research: http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~mmccrack/
misc: http://michael-mccracken.net/wp/