Bibliographies (answers and questions)

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

First of all, anyone having problems with the bib module: please
update your context. There has been a problem with the context core
that caused the list of references to always remain empty.

On Sun, 20 Jan 2002 22:08:04 +0100
"Hans Hagen" <pragma@wxs.nl> wrote:

> >and we would really not need BibTeX at all.

We don't *want* Bibtex. Bibtex is a nastly little program that uses
a nearly unparseable database format. However, as it is now, XML
is not yet wide-spread and there are lots of people that have .bib 
files. 

The bib module does not use bibtex directly, and this is very much
on purpose. It uses bibtex as a data converter and sorting engine, 
and nothing more. 

To get the bib module to use XML, a number of steps have to be
taken:

a) We need a DTD/Schema
b) We need an sorting routine for that DTD/Schema (perhaps 
   XSLT but 'plain perl' is probably more portable)
c) We need ConTeXt macros to parse the result XML
d) We need a converter BibTeX -> XML
e) We perhaps need a converter from the current TeX bib database
   to XML?

Lots of stuff to do, so I am asking for volunteers, esp. for a)
and b). (Marco?)

-- 
groeten,

Taco