Re: Citations, continued

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>]

Hi Tom and all,

tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye) writes:

> Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> writes:
>
>> Conceptually, something like `@key:year' isn't a citation, but merely
>> indirection, because it doesn't actually provide the reader of the
>> rendered document enough information to look up the reference.  I think
>> we can cut down on the number of `citation' types that the syntax should
>> support if we distinguish citations from indirection like this.
>
> I don't think this concept holds in the LaTeX world.  I'm fairly certain
> that citation commands like \citeauthor and \citeyear create an entry in
> the bibliography.

Fair enough.  I just meant that something like

"As the reader may verify, \citeyear{Doe99} fails to make any progress on this issue."

doesn't render into a form that allows the reader to know which work is
being talked about, even if that work appears in the bibliography; the
author has to supply more context for it to make sense.  Thus, \citeyear
and friends are more of a convenience for the author than commands to
produce a (complete) citation that the reader can use.

But I don't really care so much about the right definition of "citation"
as about the fact that supporting an equivalent for these commands in
non-LaTeX backends strikes me as really hard, which makes me wonder if
the effort required to support them is worth the convenience gained by
representing them in the main citation syntax.

It seems like it would be hard because providing equivalents for things
like \citeauthor or \citetitle in, say, HTML would require the exporter
to know a *lot* about how to format names and titles in the context
where those citations appear.  This is a very non-trivial problem.

But perhaps the exporter could rely on an external CSL processor for
things like this?  I don't really know if CSL can handle this kind of
`partial' citation -- if it can, and if CSL is part of the plan for
exporting citations in non-LaTeX backends, then I have no real objection
to representing them in the citation syntax, because they are indeed
convenient.

Best,
Richard