Re: [office] data templating (and citations)

Bruce D'Arcus said:
> As many of you know, I've been trying to upgrade the ODF support for  
> citations. There are three aspects of this: the citation field, the  
> bibliographic metadata, and the configuration of the output formatting. 
> I'd like to address the last here. Currently, a bibliographic entry is  
> configured like this in ODF:
...
> There are a few problems with this approach, and they mostly center on  
> the fact that it presumes the data will be there, and there is no  
> conditional logic. If there is no title, for example, there will be a  
> spurious comma.
...
> To get around these limitations, I created a new citation style  
> language (CSL), which is independent of any particular document format.  
> It's now starting to be picked up by other projects, and is even used  
> with an MS Word plug-in now.
...
> I see two options:
> 
> 1)  use CSL for configuration (either blessed by the ODF TC, or not)
> 
> 2)  adapt the logic of CSL to the existing ODF templating and  
> bibliography configuration system
> 


I agree that some sort of conditional formatting is necessary.  OpenDocument's citation system is a great step forward, but I can't currently use it in many circumstances (and have to do it in the old way like Word) because there aren't conditionals (e.g., "include a comma only if there's some data following" and so on).

Is there some reason that XSLT (or some subset of it) was not used?

--- David A. Wheeler