TODO

From: Manuel López-Ibáñez <manuellopezibanez@yahoo.es>
To: Jean-Christophe.Filliatre@lri.fr
Cc: Claude.Marche@lri.fr
Subject: bibtex2html
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 16:27:32 +0100

Hi,

first, thanks and congratulations for your great program, it makes happy 
a lot of people.

However, there are a few thinks that might be improved. I have tried to 
modify the sources by myself. Unfortunately, I have no idea of Object 
Caml so it was a wasted effort. So, here are my comments:

* Local references should be local. For example, if the output file is 
LopezIbanez.html, then any reference as

<a name="./LopezIbanez.html#publication1"> or
<a href="./LopezIbanez.html#publication1">,

should be instead

<a name="#publication1"> or
<a href="#publication1">

This way, if the name of the output file is changed or it is embedded 
into another html file, there is no need to change all local references.

* When invoked using `bibtex2html -dl -nofooter -nodoc -s plain -single 
...`, after each publication there is a <p> without an ending </p>.

* Also, when using the previous invocation in a file generated by 
bib2bib, comments inserted by bib2bib are repeated in the bibtex code of 
each publication, producing a very awful output.

* bibtex2html generates <br /> tags. These are XHTML tags and since the 
output of bibtex2html is HTML, the resulting file is not either HTML nor 
XHTML valid. The tags should be <br> .

* Finally, the most important thing for me would be that in the output 
HTML, every field would be enclosed in an appropriate CSS class. This 
would ease a lot to define a custom layout. For example, given the 
bibtex entry:

@BOOK{texbook,
    author = "Donald E. Knuth",
    title= "The {{\TeX}book}",
    publisher = "Addison-Wesley",
    year = 1984
}

my desired output HTML would be something like:

<dl>
<dt>
<a name="texbook"></a>[1]
</dt>
<dd class="BOOK">
<span class="AUTHOR">Donald E. Knuth</span>.
<span class="TITLE">The TeXbook.</span>
  <span class="PUBLISHER">Addison-Wesley</span>, <span 
class="year">2005</span>.<br>

<pre class="bibtex" id="texbook">
@BOOK{texbook,
    author = "Donald E. Knuth",
    title= "The {{\TeX}book}",
    publisher = "Addison-Wesley",
    year = 1984
}
</pre>

</dd>
</dl>

The <span>, class and id tags doesn't do anything by themselves. 
However, they allow to modify the layout easily using CSS. For example, 
I would be able to use something like this:

.AUTHOR {
	font-weight: bold;
}
.TITLE {
	font-variant: italic;
}
pre.bibtex {
	overflow: auto; /* if larger than maximum width, will produce scrollbars */
}

Moreover, implementing layout properties of different bibliographic 
styles will be rather straightforward since the CSS can be embedded in 
the header of the html file.

I hope you would consider some of my comments for future releases.

Cheers,

	Manuel.