A few weeks ago I asked the question here what we should do about the
existing bibliographic support in ODF 1.2 (text:bibliography-mark and
such) in favor of the new metadata field and system.
Patrick suggested deprecating it in the future, with a note in 1.2 that
this will happen.
The question is *how* to do this?
Traditionally, any new XML added to ODF has a fairly high-bar for
inclusion. It needs to be fully-specified, and preference is given to
existing standards; e.g. specs or portions of specs that go through some
formal standards process.
But the new metadata system I think presents us some challenges, and
that is: how do we think about suggesting -- either normatively or
informatively -- what vocabularies should be used for particular use cases?
So here's the thing: we have a standard model in RDF. That is
standardized. That model gives us reliable extension and flexibility.
Developers can add anything they want to the RDF, and so long as its
compliant, it can be read and displayed.
It is, I think, precisely the robust distributed flexibility of RDF that
means vocabularies are rarely formally standardized in the same way that
an XML language is. This is a feature, not a bug.
Surely for particular kinds of processing (like bibliographies and
citations) one has to have some expectations about the modeling, and so
we need to provide this. The question is how?
I think it's clear we should provide the specification for the citation
field in ODF 1.2.
I think it's also the case that we should not ourselves define the
vocabulary for the bibliographic source data. I am working on that in an
independent project that involves developers from different projects.