Re: [wip-cite-new] New natbib processor

[Nicolas Goaziou]

Hello,

"Bruce D'Arcus" <bdarcus@gmail.com> writes:

> The question comes down to whether to support sub-styles or not, and
> if yes, what the syntax should be.
>
> I think it makes more sense to include them because otherwise you end
> up with an insanely long list of styles, which won't map well onto
> different kinds of output formats.

I think only oc-citeproc (and oc-basic) may be targetting multiple
output formats. I doubt it would even use styles; I assume that is
entirely determined by the CSL file.

> E.g. biblatex users will want like 20 commands available, which won't
> all work with other formats.

So you would have 20 styles, with shortcuts for the most commons. This
is not insane, and the mapping is done only once.

Styles do not need to be compatible between processors. As a reminder,
there's the "fallback rule". According to it, each processor must:
- provide a default styles;
- map any unknown style to the style above.

Thanks to this, there will not be any incompatibility between documents
upon switching processors.

Agreeing on a small set of common styles is a good thing; this is what
your doing on your wiki. But there is nothing wrong to map
"text-alt-full" style to the default one in another processor. 

Of course, the default style may be unrelated to "text", but is it
a problem in practice? If you switch processor and use complex styles
(here style + sub-styles), you will need to change them anyway, because
the compatibility is so low.

> Also consider that for processors, they're going to have to map those
> internally to something like styles+sub-styles anyway.

Exactly. For developers, it doesn't make a huge difference here.

> Even if not perfect, I think it's a small price to pay for the
> benefits.

I'm still not convinced by the benefits. Could you describe a situation
where sub-styles would be really beneficial?

Regards,
-- 
Nicolas Goaziou