Next Generation Citation Support
I only learned yesterday that Word 2007 will be gaining support for citations and bibliographies, as will the XML format MS is submitting to ECMA.
Peter Sefton has a quick look at the new support, as well as some general thoughts about what we need to move forward.
I’ll discuss the low-level XML details in a separate post, but I’d like to comment on this point that Peter raises:
I think that we are going to end up with a huge mess in this area, with incompatible implementations of embedded bibliographic data from OpenDocument and Open XML, with no backwards compatibility for Word versions earlier than 2007. Some people at USQ use EndNote, but unless it gets OpenDocument support it won’t interoperable either.
Unless someone can pull all this together in the standards committees, that is.
I think that the open source community should put effort into a more microformat-style approach. My idea is to use hyperlinks as citation markers and make a stand-alone web-enabled bibliography tool (which is where the hyperlinks would point) that can live either on your computer or on a server and can synchronize libraries. This tool would be able to format bibliographies for OpenDocument and MS Word.
I think this reflects a misunderstanding of how the new citation support will work in OpenDocument in particular. There, a citation will consist of two pieces: a source element that contains pointers to metadata records, and a body element that contains rendered citations. It is just a purpose-designed dynamic field, which is basically what Peter is asking for above. The new Word 2007 support is conceptually the same, though with one difference I’ll discuss more later. There really is the possibliity now for greatly enhanced interoperability.
Where I think Peter gets nervous is that OXML and ODF both use package file structures, and in both cases bibliographic metadata can be stored within those packages as separate files. Peter’s right; I think this is a really good thing. I’m willing even to ditch backward compatability in the interest in adopting well-designed and fully open file formats. There wil be short-term pain, but promise of long-term nirvana.
Also, I forgot to add that MS will be adding the ability to open and save Open XML files to previous versios of Office as far back as Office 2000.
My view both overlaps with and diverges from Peter’s, then. My perspective is we need:
- to strongly decouple citations, from reference storage, from formatting
- to move citations and formatting into the document format, so they are standardized
- something like Peter’s suggestion of standardized ids (uris) for identifying citations
All of these together will enhance innovation in the market, and make users’ lives easier.
All of this comes with caveats, though, which will be the subject of my next post.
