Citations - Mixed VS element

[Melissa37]

Kaveh Bazargan via googlegroups.com:
Has there been discussion on this? I feel that the only way to deal with interchangeable xml is to use element citation rather than the mixed citation which is almost always abused. I feel that there should not be any punctuation in XML, which should contain only data. Punctuation can easily be inserted according to rules, during rendering. Yes, there are exceptional cases, and in those we can use mixed citation, when absolutely essential. but in STM this is rare.

Paul Donohoe via googlegroups.com
I find myself agreeing with Kaveh. Citations are perhaps where there is most variance in content and consequently most variance in markup between publishers. Maybe this would be a suitable area for us to work on next?

[Melissa37]

Nikos Markantonatos via googlegroups.com:
Jan 20

I find that mixed-citation, when encoded properly, offers the ideal blend between the break-down of the citation text into semantically important chunks (authors, source, year, volume, page, etc) and the actual presentation style of the citation resembling the one used by the publisher in the print publication or the PDF. A fully encoded citation wrapped inside a mixed-citation element captures both semantics and presentation. For publishers, who care only to link citations to the corresponding online articles, the encoded citation sub-elements can include only those necessary to effect the citation linking (typically a subset of all citation elements). For citations which come with no broken down information whatsoever, you can still use mixed-citation to encode the citation as plain text. All of the options are there for the publishers to choose from with a single powerful element.

[doylemd]

I fully support Nikos' take on this. Our practice is to semantically tag anything that we can in mixed-citation with the effect that stripping out the tags from a citation leaves a properly formatted and punctuated citation. One gray area is when there are elements like DOIs and ISBNs which should not be displayed by default, but which are used for linking or other purposes. However, sometimes these need to be visible. For instance, some journals forgo article numbers or pagination altogether and use (journal, volume, DOI) as the unique citation metadata. In these cases, the DOI needs to be displayed. To handle this, we add the attribute specific-use="suppress-display" when we have a bibliographic element we don't want to display as part of the citation.