[whatwg] on bibtex-in-html5

Bruce D'Arcus bdarcus at gmail.com
Sun May 24 07:17:01 PDT 2009


On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 5:35 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

...

> I agree that BibTeX is suboptimal. But what should we use instead?

As I've suggested:

1) use Dublin Core.

This gives you the basic critical properties: literals for titles and
dates, and relations for versions, part/containers, contributors,
subjects.

You then have a consistent and general way to represent (HTML)
documents and embedded references to other documents, etc. (citation
references). This would cover the most important areas that BibTeX
covers.

2) this goes far, but you're then left with a few missing pieces for citations:

a. more specific contributors (like editors and translators)
b. identifiers (there's dc:identifier, but no way to explicitly denote
that it's a doi, isbn, issn, etc.)
c. what I call "locators"; volume, issue, pages, etc.
d. types (book, article, patent, etc.)

If there's some consensus on this basic way forward, we can talk about
details on 2.

Bruce



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