On May 23, 2011, at 11:32 PM, John Haltiwanger wrote:
I hope my question does not come off as too aggressive, but why on earth are we still using BibTeX? Or, more accurately, when can we _stop_ using BibTeX and move onto something that has native UTF-8 support and can also integrate with a reasonable configuration environment such as CSL?
What is the next step for bibliographies in Context? Surely we won't be chained to BibTeX (which has seemingly been largely been in practice for the sake of BibLaTeX) forever?
You do sound a bit impatient, but the answer is: bibtex is a beast, but bibliographies is such an endless topic, there are so many permutations and possibilities and options that "replacing bibtex" is easier said than done. bibtex gets the job done, most of the time, and I've always heard that there will be a "next big thing which will replace bibtex," but it never quite happened. zotero's approach (a completely untransparent, complex and hence fragile sql database) is a lot worse than bibtex. As to the question "why strings": Pontus's answer named one important aspect. I have several .bib files which contain nothing but string definitions: one with abbreviated, one with full journal titles; one with English strings ("reprint," "Munich") and one with the German equivalent ("Nachdruck," "München"). Including the right file(s) will then provide the desired output. Thomas