DOCBOOK: RFE: online values for pubwork

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo at metalab dot unc dot edu>]

I've submitted the following RFE at sourceforge. Comments are
appreciated.


In DocBook 4.2 the citetitle element has these seven enumerated values
for the pubwork attribute, all denoting various kinds of traditional
print publishing:

article
book
chapter
journal
manuscript
part
refentry
section
series
set

However, more and more often, important, citeable work is being
published first or only online. This is especially true in
DocBook's domain of technical documentation. While occasionally
one of the above fits an online publication (e.g. pubwork="journal"
can equally well describe an online journal as a paper one), there
are many other cases, where this is not true. For example, here's
a citation of an e-mail message posted to xml-dev that I've included
in my next book:

<footnote>
  <para>
    <citetitle>
      <ulink

url="http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/xml-dev-Jan-2000/1085.html";>Re: 
      Attribute normalisation and character entities</ulink>
    </citetitle>,
      posted on the xml-dev
      mailing list, January 27, 2000
  </para>
</footnote>

I propose the addition of at least three new values for pubwork:

e-mail:
    An e-mail message, generally though not necessarily
    one posted to a public list.

webpage:
    A web page, normally though not necessarily written
    in HTML and accessible at a certain URL on a certain date.
    An alternative would be a "url" value for
    any resource that is addressable by a URL.

news:
    A posting to a Usenet newsgroup

Alternately, it might be reasonable to subsume all three of these cases
(and several less common ones besides) into a single "online" value.
However, it is increasingly clear that the current set is too limiting.
--

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001)           |
|             http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/              |
|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/   |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
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