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Jennifer Michelstein, the Microsoft program manager for academic features, has posted the first of a series of blog entries on the new citation support in Word 2007. In comments, we have been going back-and-forth on a few issues of concern.

Out of that conversation, I conclude:

1. version 1 will not support the footnnote/endnote style citations common in the humanities
2. it seems (though I’ve not confirmed it) they don’t support first/subsequent citations in author-year styles
3. they will provide an SDK to connect remote databases, though no evidence that they are even aware that there are well-deployed existing standards (z30,.50, and the more modern SRU and SRW equivalents) in this space
4. they think it quite fine to leave it to third-parties to provide different styles for users, in XSLT

As a I said in the comments, I think the last point particularly short-sighted. It will be really hard for anybody but XSLT experts to write good styles, and they will be specific to Word. Moreover, the style files will be huge, and difficult for users to install (impossible in some cases, if they don’t have appropriate installation rights).

Nevertheless, it does mean there’s plenty of room for someone to swap out the existing raw XSLT approach and replace it with my (I think much better) citeproc alternative. And I’ve been talking to M. David Peterson about just that.

Mark had an idea that I think may well be brilliant: use Atom to do much of the metadata and distribution work. It turns out that the current metadata element in CSL is almost exactly (in fact, by design) the same at the Atom metadata content. Moreover, the rest of a CSL file could be easily embedded in the atom:content element, and then individual entries linked together into feeds.

So what if, then, users never had to worry about installing style files? They would just subscribe to one or feeds in their areas. If a new style they wanted appeared, they’d click a link and it would be automatically installed. If an updated version of an already-installed style showed up, the local version would be automatically updated. Plus, it ought to be possible to embed an XHTML preview of the style somewhere (perhaps in the atom:summary element?).

Finally, because CSL is designed to be document-format agnostic, the same files could be used by users of any authoring solution: Word, OpenOffice, Writely, LaTeX, DocBook, web applications, etc.

There’d still be details to work out (I’d really like to allow distributed repositories), of course, but doesn’t this seem much better than the current MS approach?

Tags: Citations, Word 2007, XML

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 15th, 2006 at 3:45 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.