RE: HTML-Note and bibliographies

I should also point out that many publishers are wary about letting a system auto-number bibliographic citations (though they love the convenience of autonumbering footnotes). The reason is that footnotes can move around a lot in the course of editing and producing a publication (and must always be in consecutive numerical order), whereas bibliographic citations tend to be fixed. Also, bibliographic citations are most often cited by many multiple points in the text (whereas footnotes are typically one-to-one). So a <label> with explicit content would often be preferable to publishers, I think, for bibliographic citations, with unique @ids that don't care about being consecutive on each citation and @hrefs every place they're cited in the text.—Bill Kasdorf

From: Ivan Herman [mailto:ivan@w3.org]
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2016 3:39 AM
To: Shane McCarron
Cc: Liam Quin; W3C Digital Publishing IG
Subject: Re: HTML-Note and bibliographies


On 26 Apr 2016, at 01:40, Shane McCarron <shane@spec-ops.io<mailto:shane@spec-ops.io>> wrote:

Comments inline:

On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 6:20 PM, Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org<mailto:liam@w3.org>> wrote:
On Mon, 2016-04-25 at 12:07 -0500, Shane McCarron wrote:
> There was a question in the meeting today about whether a
> bibliography
>
[...]
>    - If "type" is empty for a note, then prefer its title attribute
> for
>    display value

In general it's poor design to take text content from attributes,
because that precludes having markup (e.g. if a bibliographic reference
italicizes "et al." in the list of authors or puts a journal volume
number in bold, or has Japanese ruby annotations). So I'm a little wary
of this. See [Quin, Rueben, Io _et. al_, 1984_b_] for details :-).

Yeah - I am aware of this (obviously).  But I don't really have a good alternative that would be both flexible AND easy to use.  The title attribute accommodates popular citation styles (e.g., APA).   Do you have an alternate suggestion?

Well… I have seen bibliographies in history (my wife is a historian) where the citation mark is an arabic number in superscript:-(

Ivan






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Ivan Herman, W3C
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