Re: DOCBOOK: Bibliography: citing journal articles

[Robin Cover <robin at isogen dot com>]

Could someone with a 10-year memory of DocBook do their
best to rehearse the origins of the "bibliography"
model in the DocBook DTD?  Like: "it was based on NNNNNN".

The TEI encoding for bibliographic reference is
(likewise) somewhat difficult to use in the general case
because the TEI encoding perspective is (first and
foremost):

  Having OCR'd this paper-print book with its formatted
  bibliographic citations (in-text citations and bibliographic
  reference list citations), *how* can I insert markup
  between the characters so as to "tag" the formatted
  bibliographic reference?

This isn't meant as a fundamental criticism of TEI, which has
legitimate concerns, but a general observation that a
bibliographic model designed for one goal often does not
work well for the general case *IF* the design caved in to
SGML's penchant to privilege the "raw" character stream.
I am hopeful that with the rise of transform sub-languages,
SGML/XML applications designers will become more willing
to step back from this in order to model the information
structure of re-usable objects like bibliographic
references.   When done at the more abstract level, it
should be possible to give better support to a number
of different bibliographic perspectives that can emerge
from the same data model (descriptive bibliography,
enumerative bibliography, analytic bibliography, etc.).
BiBTeX (rip-off of Reid's Scribe) made a good beginning
philosophically, I think, but the model is very
under-developed.

- Robin