using html/css, i would like to automatically generate a bibliography at the bottom of my website akin to latex's \bibliography command

Question

I'll ask my question first, then give some background for those who are interested:

I would like to know if there is a command in html that will automatically generate a bibliography from a .bib file? This means that throughout the text, i would add something like <cite name="Jones2010">, and then at the bottom of the html (or css) file, I would write something like <makebib file="biblist.bib", format="APA">, and a bibliography would be generated using my .bib file, and formated according to the APA style. The functionality would be quite similar to footnotes, except that each footnote is populated according to some script that extracts the information from (essentially) an xml file and outputs the content in the desired format. It is not difficult to imagine somebody creating a tool to do just that, however, my google search skills have not enabled me to find such a tool. It is easy to find tools that convert bib files to html or xml, but that is not sufficient for my needs. I do not desire to publish my entire bib file online. Rather, for each document that I generate, I want several of the entries in the bib file to be included as footnotes. Any pointers will be greatly appreciated.

Now, the reason behind the question:

I have recently begun switching from writing all my manuscripts using latex to writing them using html/css. The advantages of this approach are fast: only 1 file for versioning (instead of .dvi, .ps, .aux, .blg, etc.), it is much smaller to share, other people can edit the html file and compile it much more easily, it is more configurable to my tastes, easier to read on screen, etc. The disadvantage for me, however, is that while I've been writing in latex for years, I've only just begin using html and css for scientific document creating. The main impetus for the switch was MathJaX, which enables me to to embed latex equations in my html files, and therefore, allows me to combine the advantages of latex with the advantages of css. I imagine that nearly all my colleagues will switch away from latex to this simpler format, assuming a few remaining issues get resolved, like ease of creating bibliographies.

Many thanks.

Answer 1

What you're asking isn't possible, unless when you specify html/css you really mean html/css/php or html/css/python or some other combination that includes an actual programming language, rather than just a markup language.

I understand your motivation, I'd love to switch to html instead of latex! However, I suspect an html-based solution would involve so much extra processing added on top to sort out bibliographies etc that the complexity would start approaching that of LaTeX by the time you got it all worked out.

I'd be pleased to be proven wrong on this!

Answer 2

I've done this, in the past, using XSLT and BibTeX. In outline, the steps are

1. Mark up your document using some convention or other: I used <span class='citation'>Smith99</span>
2. Write an XSLT script to transform that file into a .aux file with \citation commands in it
3. Use BibTeX along with a .bst file which spits out HTML rather than LaTeX
4. Use another XSLT script (or the same one, in a different mode) to pull the bibliography in

It's not quite as fiddly as it sounds, but you can look at how I did it on google code. In particular, see structure.xslt and plainhtml.bst.

If there's a more direct way, I'd be quite interested to hear about it.

Answer 3

Both answers so far are somewhat correct, although not quite what you were asking for. Part of the problem is that the question as it's phrased doesn't necessarily makes sense.

HTML is just markup; you need something to process the markup, be it python, php, ruby, etc.

And you probably want to write in XML (or XHTML), not HTML.

XSLT may work for you (once it's in XML), but remember, an XSLT document that defines a set of rules. You would get an XSLT engine to apply your XSLT rules against your XML document.

Answer 4

You can create an html bibliography from a .bib file using bibtex2html. This package takes a series of command line arguments and extracts the info from the BibTeX source and outputs a file with html markup.

As far as I know you cannot get it to read and parse the html document like the LaTeX \cite command but there are several ways to indicate the references you want. I find that the easiest way is to just maintain a text file of the BibTeX keys I use in my manuscript and then call this using the --citefile option. There is also a tool called bib2bib included that will take search commands.

It is a very flexible package and there are a lot of options so it works in a lot of situations. For example you can get it to omit the <html> headers from the output file so that you can directly paste into an existing html document.

The documentation is useful but make sure you look at the pdf documentation file and the man pages.