Re: m-bib, xml, etc.

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

On Mon, 5 Aug 2002 11:05:04 -0400 (EDT), Bruce wrote:
> 
> Sounds great!  I can't comment on any technical issues because I don't 
> know much about xml.  I do, however, know what I need in a bib system, 
> and so will be happy to give input going forward.  It sounds like I 
> ought to wait a bit before moving my fairly complex bib database off of 
> Endnote though, and go with xml rather than bibtex.  

You can assume that the XML bibtex format is roughly
the current bibtex functionality + explicit tagging for
the parts of an author's name, separated keywords, and
support for subtitles. Just think about what features you
miss in bibtex and write those down, that will be quite
helpful.

> Any sense of timeframe here Taco?

Couple of weeks I think, it has taken long enough by now ;)

> Also, has anyone taken a look at refDB?  
> 
> see http://refdb.sourceforge.net
> 
> It's a bib system built on MySQL that processes both Docbook and LaTeX 
> documents.

The XML files that define the formatting stylesheets are quite 
interesting. I think I will adopt these instead of the current
TeX syntax. 

Their input format for bibliographic data is not XML though,
but RIS. I'm not overly please with that, and using docbook or 
tei markup for bibliographic databases is probably a mistake, 
so I vote for sticking with the bibtex-DTD.

-- 
groeten,

Taco