2012-09-18 "Schmitz Thomas A."
The problem is that users of bibtex in ConTeXt are a minority, and users of such precooked styles a tiny minority
With a handful of up-to-date working common citation styles citations would be much more easy. But I get your point.
I use bibtex quite often, but wouldn't know how to fix these styles and have never used them. So if you're sure about what to do, fix them and send Hans a patch.
Frankly, I'm no expert in those things. The bibliographies I created so far were quick and dirty, I didn't have the time to create proper styles or repair the shipped ones. I will see what I can do to at least improve the existing ones after the current project is done.
Maybe someone has already prepared a working file for the APA style?
Possible. I have @ELECTRONIC definitions in my own private style files, but have never used APA.
Same here.
\setuppublications [alternative=apa, criterium=cite, sort=author]
You haven't read carefully enough, it's sorttype=author
This doesn't work, either: \setupbibtex [database=sample] \setuppublications [alternative=apa, criterium=cite, sorttype=author] \starttext \cite[hh2010a] \cite[Eijkhout1991] \placepublications \stoptext
\completepublications produces an empty page. Is that intended?
http://archive.contextgarden.net/message/20110923.091734.6b388a11.en.html
Using criterium=text fixed it.
What is BibTeX used for in ConTeXt? As far as I can see, it reads the .bib database and generates a .bbl file which then is read in by ConTeXt. Why do we need an external tool for this? Why does ConTeXt not read in the .bib database and directly save it as a Lua table?
Because nobody has coded that part yet? This may not be as easy as you make it sound because quite a few heuristics go into parsing bibtex files (e.g., look at the way in which bibtex divides names into first name, last name, von-part, jr-part).
I'm aware of that. So it basically boils down to the fact that bibliographies are not popular among ConTeXt users (including Hans) and therefore much functionality is not properly implemented or cared for. And BibTeX is used since it understands the semantics of bib files, although a pure ConTeXt/Lua solution would be possible. Without BibTeX this functionality would be missing since no one is willing to implement a parser for .bib databases. If I only had time… Marco