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

[Marius L.]

On Sun, 2004-05-09 at 13:41 +0200, Torsten Bronger wrote:
> > What about <address country="us">Boston, Massachusetts</address>?
> 
> This forces the processors to include huge ISO tables, and doesn't
> allow for alternate versions of the name that the author of the item
> would prefer for some reason.  I think a <country> tag is not too
> costly.

I don't think such a compromise is a good idea at all. After all, the
distinguishing feature of Bibulus is multi-lingualism, isn't it? This
means it will have to handle quite a lot of language-specific nastiness
such as this. 

Size of tables is hardly an argument nowadays; maintainability, on the
other hand, might be (AFAIK there are some 250 countries in ISO 3166).

> Well, somewhere you must draw a line anyway.  A style that wants to
> translate City names is very stange in my opinion.  

Not at all; it's very common. Having "Florence, Italy" appear in a non-
English bibliography will be frowned upon by users who expect the
bibliography to be presented in the same language as the rest of the
text.

> After all, it's
> not about finding and visiting somebody, but about a tag for
> identification.

Not true. It's about formalism. Publishers and magazines sometimes have
quite strict guidelines about these things.

> 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. Things will fall
through the cracks, but that is, as you've stated, unavoidable.

-- 
Marius L. Jøhndal