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

[Torsten Bronger]

Halloechen!

Thomas Widmann <address@hidden> writes:

> Torsten Bronger <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> [...]
>>
>> <city>
>>   <cityname xml:lang="de">München</cityname>
>>   <cityname>Munich</cityname>
>> </city>
>
> Not a good idea, since all the names of every city would have to
> be repeated again and again.

This I wanted to demonstrate.  But believe it or not, another
BibTeX-XML project suggested something like that (not with cities
though).

>> <city refid="de/Munich">
>>
>> with an appropriate city data base entry.
>
> Better, but <city country="de">München</city> would be better since it
> would provide a sensible fall-back if it wasn't mentioned in the city
> database.

Yes, right.

>> Both is unrealistic in my opinion, and unnecessary.
>
> We'll know more about realism soon, but it *is* necessary.

I don't think so, but because you think it is and I must admit that
I've thought about it only shortly, I'll try to help to find a
solution.

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.  It needn't be an
XML database, a mere list should be enough.  But it must become part
of the standard.  Then take your example from above

<city country="de">München</city>

I think the only thing that is missing is language in addition to
country.  We can assume a default language based on the country
attribute, however this is a little bit fragile.  More XMLish is
probably to use English as default and read the xml:lang attribute
if present.  So, a Russian who want to write Moscow in Cyrillic has
to use xml:lang in <city> or its ancestors, *or* they have to write
"Moscow".

The underlying city database will contain as primary keys the
American English and the native name; other combinations like

<city country="de" xml:lang="it">Aquisgrana</city>

are allowed but rare enough to accept the possible failure.

On the other hand the set of translations is of course not something
*we* have to worry about.  For one particular journal when the
destination language is clear, it will be only one additional column
in the database anyway, and this is a very common case I suspect.

The same for the country.

> [...]
>
>> For journals however there are already lists with official
>> abbreviations available for decades.
>
> Do you have any good links to such lists?  It would be nice to add
> them if possible.

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.

Tschoe,
Torsten.

-- 
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus