Comment by miyu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miyu | Hacker News Reader

This looks really useful, but one thing I wish citation managers would consolidate around is a well-defined format for citation data, such as CSL-JSON [^1]. I have regretfully never seen CITATION.cff files anywhere else, but CSL-JSON seems to see concerted efforts from:

* Zotero, with BetterBibTex plugin [^2]

* pandoc, through its updated citeproc library [^3]

* the citation plugin for Obsidian, which uses CSL-JSON [^4]

This might in the end be my personal preference, but a standardized JSON format (which is just as easily adaptable to YAML [^5]) seems much easier to parse and modify than Bibtex, with its sheer complexity. If we want to have the ability to easily cite anything, then this direction of standardization, I believe, is a must.

[^1]: https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema#csl-json-s...

[^2]: https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/exporting/pandoc/#u...

[^3]: https://github.com/jgm/citeproc

[^4]: https://github.com/hans/obsidian-citation-plugin

[^5]: https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/issues/278

Yep, came here to say the same thing.

There's already a lot of open source work going on around CSL, which I think originally comes out of Zotero.

While CSL comes from Javascript world, there already is a complete ruby implementation, providing ability to format a cituation into any citation style in the CSL style repository. https://github.com/inukshuk/csl-ruby https://github.com/inukshuk/citeproc

Even if github or other open source authors weren't happy with that implementation (whether for legitimate reasons or "not invented here"), it would still have been nice to do something around the basic CSL standards in some way, instead of inventing a new similar standard in ".cff".

Quick question: are the two formats semantically identical in the sense that a program can convert from one format to the other and back, with 100% accuracy? Thanks.

Looks like I posted prematurely without looking up prior discussions on this topic, but here's a detailed comparison from someone much more knowledgable than me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28254775

Hm, that comment mainly seems to talk about how CFF is very specialized at citing software, as opposed to the more general CSL.

"It is is specifically for citing software and datasets… Unfortunately, though, because the schema only has enough fields for citing those two…"

However, the link in OP here suggests they've expanded CFF beyond that to be used to cite anything. https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi...

Can tell from what you linked, does this JSON format have anything like bib(la)tex's \mkbibquote and \mkbibemph?

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