Re: DOCBOOK: title vs. citetitle and ulink in biblioentry

[Michael Smith <smith at xml-doc dot org>]

Jason Diamond <jason@injektilo.org> writes:

> I'm new to DocBook so was searching the archives on the best way to link to
> an online article in a biblioentry. I found a message [1] by Norm Walsh that
> recommends this:
> 
> <biblioentry>
>   <citetitle><ulink url="...">title</ulink></citetitle>
>   ...
> </biblioentry>
> 
> This was a little perplexing to me since the example for bibliography [2]
> uses title instead of citetitle.
> 
> Then I stumbled across another message [3] also from Norm mentioning that
> allowing title in biblioentry was probably a mistake.
> 
> Using either title or citetitle with a nested ulink renders fine for me but
> I was wondering what the correct element, semantically speaking, is? Should
> bilbioentrie elements always use citetitle even without a nested ulink?
> Should the example be updated to reflect this best practice?

Hm, although it looks like Title is used consistently throughout all
the Biblio* examples in the documentation (TDG), it really seems like
maybe those should all be Citetitle.

Although it doesn't explicitly say it anywhere in TDG, it seems like
maybe Title was never intended to be used for citations (referencing
titles of things that already exist). I think Title is maybe meant to
be limited to *giving* names/titles to things, not referencing them.

For one thing, Title lacks the Pubwork attribute that Citetitle has.
So if you use Title to cite something, there's no way to indicate what
type of thing you're citing: a chapter name, or a book title or what.

Reading some of the the Biblio* examples, you can probably infer that
the works being cited are books, or whatever, but without having it
explicitly marked up (i.e. with a pubwork="book" attribute/value),
there's nothing a processing app could use to figure that out.

Some examples use a Relation attribute/value on Biblioset/Bibliomset
to indicate type of work cited, and one uses <title role="article">.
But those are CDATA attributes, with unconstrained values.

So using Citetitle with the Pubwork attribute -- in Biblio* stuff or
anywhere else you're actually citing/referencing things, instead of
giving a names to them -- really seems like the best way to go.


> [1]
> http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200007/msg00121.html
> [2]
> http://docbook.org/tdg/en/html/bibliography.html
> [3]
> http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook/200107/msg00119.html
> 

-- 
Michael Smith, Tokyo, Japan    http://sideshowbarker.net
&#x30DE;&#x30A4;&#x30AF;

Ages coil within
The minute Circumference
Of a single Brain -

  --Emily Dickinson (967)      http://www.logopoeia.com/ed/