Today:

• Added rendering for the document title and authors to the output.
• Re-thought the db structure for default strings and styles. It turns out we'll need GUI strings specific to individual style guides (e.g. "Retrieved [date], from [URL]" for APA), so I've subdivided the default subcollection into strings and styles subcollections, added an apa_strings.xsl file, and updated the getGuiStrings.xq code so that it collects strings from the whole default/strings subcollection. Similarly, the code for retrieving styles had to be slightly updated to take account of the db structure change.
• Greatly expanded the db style information. We're now getting down to the nitty-gritty of rendering styles as the XHTML code moves forward, and I'm making a lot of decisions about what goes in the base styles and what goes into the style-guide style document.
• Added rendering for appendices.
• Began serious work on the bibliography rendering. So far I've done books and journal articles; a lot of stuff that needs to be done for all document types is now complete, including retrieval information for electronic references, name rendering, and title handling.

Tomorrow I'll try to finish first pass through the biblio code. One major issue still remains: finding out if the current set of authors (or editors, or whatever) is the same as the previous set, so that a dash should be used. That may take some thought.

Some of the code written today makes good use of the new features in XSLT/XPath 2.0 (for instance, I use a regular expression match to determine whether a title ends with punctuation or not, so I can add a period in the reference only when it's needed). The power of this has got me thinking about the possibility that the old thorny issue of commas inside quote marks could be handled this way. Imagine that, when rendering an article title in the text, the code looks ahead to the next text() element to see if it starts with punctuation. If it does, it grabs that punctuation and includes it in before the closing quote; similarly, a text() matching template could check for the preceding sibling to see if it's an element that would be rendered with quotes, and if so, any leading punctuation is removed. That would be cool. It would require a list of all elements that are rendered with quotes, to check against. The only thing not quite clear to me yet is how to reliably find the text() element immediately following the quoted element. There is a following:: axis, so following::text() should do it, but IIRC eXist doesn't yet support this axis.