Re: html for scholarly communication: RASH, Scholarly HTML or Dokieli?

On Sun, Sep 10, 2017 at 9:49 AM, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:

> I am afraid we are engaging in some sort of theoretical discussion here
> which will never end: do we want to use the full of HTML5 or do we want to
> define a smaller structure by restricting to a subset of HTML5? I would
> think that we would be a bit ahead of this after the experiment Benjamin
> proposed: let us take a few real articles from various fields and see how
> the score with the RASH and SH; it will become easier to have an idea.
>
> Maybe one more step would be, for each of those to also see how easy it
> would be for some of these articles to be formatted via CSS (or maybe
> CSS+JavaScript) to the formats that are in use (ACM, IEEE, etc). I am
> particularly worried about the incredible differences in article reference
> formats out there, and how could one author a paper so that the content
> could be adapted to any existing requirements (there is a reason why BiBTex
> is a separate engine to LaTeX…)
>


What do you think of Citation Style Language (CSL) [1]? This as AFAIK the
defacto-standard for citations on the web: Citation managers like Zotero
and Mendeley use it, and also we use it. It does output a lot different
citation styles, and it, similarly to biblatex, has been able to distil the
features needed by reference styles to just a small number of attributes
that cover all the sciences. We are maintaining an LGPL-library a library
to read bibtex/biblatex and convert between CSL and BibLaTex [2].

As far as I am concerned, we can leave this part up to CSL and the
citeproc-js engine they are providing or some other alternative engine. As
long as the HTML we produce contains all the necessary pieces of
information for each citation/reference, such JS engines should be able to
do the rest.

If we want our format to be immediately consumable, we could even point to
some very systematic citation system that contains all the fields covered
by biblatex/CSL which would then immediately be output without any
JavaScript. Only if one adds citeproc-js the visual output could then be
converted into any of the many supported citation styles.


>
> I am perfectly aware that some of these formats are a leftover from the
> ‘print’ world. But an underlying question to part of this debate is whether
> we want to conduct an evolution or a revolution (for those of you who
> witnessed the XHTML/HTML5 war back 10 years ago this may sound familiar…).
> If we talk about a revolution than we can safely ignore that ACM and IEEE
> formatting habits. If we talk about evolution then, in my view, we cannot…
>
> Ivan
>
> P.S. With my W3C role’s hat put down:-)
>
>

[1] http://citationstyles.org/
[2] https://github.com/fiduswriter/biblatex-csl-converter


> ---
> Ivan Herman
> World Wide Web Consortium
> Publishing@W3C Technical Lead
> http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
> ORCID: 0000-0003-0782-2704
>
>
> On 10 Sep 2017, 00:05 +0200, Sarven Capadisli <info@csarven.ca>, wrote:
>
> On 2017-09-09 22:48, Johannes Wilm wrote:
>
> The formats that focus on a limited tag-set have been developed already
> (RASH and Scholarly HTML) may have just about everything we need
> already.
>
> It certainly does not, and that's part of the issue here.
>
> Scholarly HTML doesn't set that constraint. RASH has the following 32
> elements:
>
> a, blockquote, body, code, em, figcaption, figure, h1, head, html, img,
> li, link, math, meta, ol, p, pre, q, script, section, span, strong, sub,
> sup, svg, table, td, th, title, tr, ul
>
> Looking at that list, it seems predominantly a *print first* approach,
> not "Web first"! In 2015 it was about 25 elements, and that was
> certainly all one needed. So much for that.
>
> The last thing SH would want to respond to the scholarly community is
> something like "`video`? Sorry that's not allowed. Please align your
> perception of scholarly information on the Web with ours (circa 2017)."
>
> That exact line of reasoning holds true for any given element or
> arbitrary constraint on top of the *living* HTML spec.
>
> Again, authors will want to do things beyond what SH could possibly
> capture, or the CG can plan for. Plenty of skills in this CG, but let's
> not forget that we are only a vocal minority. I suggest that we do not
> prematurely think we got scholarly information covered by way of x
> elements or whatever.
>
> -Sarven
> http://csarven.ca/#i
>
>


-- 
Johannes Wilm
http://www.johanneswilm.org
tel: +1 (520) 399 8880