[Bibulus-dev] Re: Many authors

[Torsten Bronger]

Halloechen!

address@hidden (Thomas M. Widmann) writes:

> "Torsten Bronger" <address@hidden> writes:
>
> [...]
>
>> I like the idea of context independent entries.  If I extract a part
>> of my bibliography for a friend, I needn't pick all necessary
>> authors, too.
>
> It would be very easy to implement an extract function in Bibulus.
>
> Besides, in the syntax I proposed, the entries would still make sense
> on their own, because the author would still be there -- there would
> just be an informative link to extra information about him/her.

Granted, this is true.

>> As far as language dependent names are concerned: If you refer to
>> something, you must give the original data.  So even if you cite the
>> TeXbook in a Chinese journal, you must write Knuth with Latin
>> letters.  The script is part of the bibliography entry and therefore
>> I see no need for this sort of "language switchboard" that you
>> propose.
>
> Sorry, no.  Let me try to reverse what you said:
>
>     So even if you cite his "little red book" in a English journal,
>     you must write Mao Zedong with Chinese characters.
>
> See? ;-)  (You might argue this is nonsense, because you'd never cite
> the original in an English journal, but rather the translation.  But
> perhaps there is no translation.  Would you then expect the author to
> be written in Chinese characters?)

Yes of course, because anything else would be useless.  To put it
drastically, you need the glyphs from the cover.  If there is no
translation, the interested reader would have to be able to read
Chinese anyway.

> [...]
>
> I know all of this sounds pretty theoretical, but it is an important
> goal (for me) that Bibulus is able to support multilingual
> bibliographies.

This is true, but XML with its unicode is 90% of this goal I think.
A big part of language support is the layout flexibility, because
not only the journals, but also the countries have different
standards regarding this.

> And I think one of the most key insights of BibTeX was "write
> once, use many times"; by this I mean that there should only be a
> need for one bibliograhic entry for a book, no matter which
> language the text it is cited in is in.

As far as e.g. notes and addresses are concerned, I see the need of
language dependency.  But not in the case of things of the front
cover.

>> >> >  And, you can use entities for it.
>> >
>> > How much can you put into an entity?
>> 
>> A whole XML document.  But no tag must be left open.
>
> OK, so you could pretty easily make an entity per author.  That might
> be a better solution.  Or it might not.  That is the question...

An entity has nothing to do with your DTD and not even with
structure.  It is a mere abbreviation for us human people.  Expect
that all XML will be read and written entirely by programs
eventually.

Try to make a bib entry independent, and add the possibility to link
it with other data.  This is the best compromise I think.

Tschoe,
Torsten.