On Mar 31, 2005, at 11:31 AM, Timothy W. Cole wrote:
> But it'd be a shame if MODS didn't at least anticipate the basic
> content needs and build in early on the facility to deal with them.
My question here, of course, came out of discussions with more
scientific end-users, who do math. In that world, TeX (and BibTeX)
reigns supreme. Part of the reason is an almost-cult-like loyalty to
TeX that's not always rational (hmm ... maybe like MARC in the library
world?). But there's of course the practical issue that you can embed
equations and macros and such in BibTeX fields. So when I talk to
these people, they tend to say "why should I bother with an XML
bibliographic format that's more verbose than BibTeX, but can't do
math?"
And then I talk to the humanities people from the TEI community who say
"but a bibliographic format that can't even do inline markup of titles
isn't a REAL bibliographic format" (I'm paraphrasing, but I did have
someone tell me virtually that). I can of course point out to them all
the ways MODS is better-designed than the TEI model, but they have a
point on this issue.
I'm even finding online journal databases these days resorting to the
awkwardness of adding HTML tags to plain text export formats; e.g.:
T1 - Some <i>Title</i> with a Title
Bruce
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