[pmwiki-users] Bibliographies

christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com
Thu Sep 14 09:38:36 CDT 2006


On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, John Rankin wrote:

> On Wednesday, 13 September 2006 10:01 PM, christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
> >
> >If (:bibtex:) renders a bibliography, why not call it (:bibliography:), or 
> >am I missing something here?  (I doubt the casual author will know what 
> >BibTeX is)

<snipped and placed first>
> But mostly, I haven't really thought about what markup to use yet,
> and was just using (:bibtex:) as an illustration...

As an illustration it is fine... but let me verify that I understood it 
correct when I think that (:bibtex:) was meant to render as the 
bibliography? In other words (:bibtex:) is the directive that will result 
in the bibliography being shown at the place where the author placed the 
directive.

(We might end up introducing something like (:bibtex:) ... (:bibtexend:) 
in order to clearly deliminate where the BibTeX markup can be found).


<snipping back:->
> Some possible reasons:
> 
> - we are proposing to adopt bibtex markup so there is a case for
>   making this explicit

For the database yes, but if (:<whatever-we-use>:) is meant to produce a 
bibliography, you could imagine different kinds of "markup" being 
supported for the database. In that case the kind of database should be a 
parameter rather than the name of the directive.

Theoretically we could someday support

	(:bibliography sourceFormat=endnotes ... :)

> - terse markup is better than verbose markup, so the markup doesn't
>   get in the way of the content (as long as the meaning is clear)

That argument only works for me when it is something that you write 
often... when it is at most once per page, I think the difference between

	(:bibtex:) v.s.(:bibliography:) v.s. even (:bib:)

is minimal. Besides, we could just allow both versions.

> - what about (:references:) as an alternative?

'Bibliography' and 'References' are the same to me really - I've seen both 
used as the heading for the bibliography section. The word "bibliography" 
might be slightly more "correct" from a librarians point of view though.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr


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