darcusblog

Peter again on citations in Word. Two issues he raises; first about my argument that MS ought to use a CSL (or CSL-like) abstraction on top of a generic XSLT:

Bruce has some concerns about the complexity and size of the XSLT involved, but I don’t think that matters so much -what matters is that XSLT is involved. All that’s required is an CSL to XSLT compiler. Feed CSL in one end and get a Word 2007 compatible stylesheet out the other. This could be done with a stand alone tool.

That would be possible, but not very realistic. It adds further steps to setting up a new style, and as I mentioned, each style file would be verty large. We need to start thinking about open citation style repositories, where a user (or even just a processing tool) can grab a new definition as needed. That is only convenient where the files are:

• self-contained
• small

The questions Peter asks near the end (about adding and creating new styles, repositories, etc.) will all have fairly uninspiring answers with the current approach. With CSL, not only do we have a feature-rich language that satisfies the above requirements, but one that is both language and document-format agnostic. One can use the same styles files with ANY document format: Open XML, OpenDocument, DocBook, XHTML, RTF; even TeX.

The second big question Peter asks is whether citations support ought to be standard in Word (or OpenOffice for that matter).

And I’m still dubious about the value of having the bibliographic software built into Word 2007; Microsoft’s site clearly states that if you load a file with citations in it into an earlier version of Word they will be converted to plain text. This means that the feature will not be usable in a real-world context for several years. People have to collaborate with others, work from home and in internet cafes; we can’t mandate Word 2007 in all those places.

First, I think MS can do better than convert the citations to text. I suggest that with their patch to add OXML suppot to previous versions of Office, they include at least basic support to preserve the new citation logic, and perhaps a separate plug-in that provides basic GUI support that would allow compatability with Word 2007.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that this stuff be standardized within document formats and included within editing applications. It’s critical, and the sad state of the current market is a direct consequence of the fact that it is not. So I’d emphasize again that I think there’s tremendous promise in this approach, and that it is just in need of some refinement.

Tags: Documents, Word 2007, XML, XSLT

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.