Unlearning "occurrences"

One of the problems that both the old and new approaches are addressing is the fact that the more complicated formats (like APA, Chicago, etc.) require that references be formatted differently depending on the context in which they appear.  For example, some formats call for a complete version of the reference the first time it appears in a document, and an abbreviated version everywhere else.  Some formats want the in-text citation to use only the author name, but in contexts where this is not sufficient to identify the correct reference, they include the title (or a portion thereof).

Prior versions of Sente supported this by allowing you to specify exactly which contexts, or occurrences, a style cared about (most only cared about a few) and then it allowed / required you to create completely different formats for each one.  For example, if a format required different contents for the first vs. subsequent occurrences of a reference, one would add the "subsequent" occurrence to the format definition, and then specify exactly how references should appear in this case.  Often the definitions for many occurrences were very similar, differing in only a few details.

We have now changed this approach fundamentally.  Now, instead of a potentially large number of "occurrences," a bibliography format in Sente only includes one in-text and one bibliography format for each reference type.  And the format definition for each of these can contain elements whose appearance is conditional, based on the context in which the reference appears.  That is, there is one in-text format for journal articles in each bibliography format definition.  This single format might include, say, two versions of the author list: one for the first appearance and the second for all other appearances, but all of the other details are specified only once.  This approach eliminates a lot of redundant work, and I know from experience just how hard it was to keep this redundant information in sync.

Here is another way to look at it.  If you read my last post (about customizing the preview display), you will see that it is possible to set things up so that there are two different versions of the in-text format displayed.  (My example in that post was first and subsequent appearances.)  In the old version of Sente, these would have been specified completely independently.  In the new version, they are each a version of the single, in-text format specification.  Because this specification contains some elements that appear and disappear based on the context conditions, the specification can result in two or more very different outputs for any one reference, thus the need for two different previews.

Now when you want to modify a format to behave slightly differently in a different context, you can leave untouched all of the elements that stay the same, and only apply conditions to those elements that should be different from one context to the next.

While it may take some time to adjust to this new approach, having personally recreated the most complex formats using the new approach, I can say that I think the new approach is much better than the old one.  This change, along with all of the other recent changes to the bibliography format editor, makes creating and maintaining complex formats much easier than it has even been before.