Finally, Citation.js supports DOIs. It took a while, but it’s finally there. One big ‘but’: synchronous fetching doesn’t work in Chrome. I’m still looking into that, but I should be recommending you to use Cite.async() anyway. Also in this blog post: more stability in Cite#get(), a welcome byproduct of using the DOI API, and looking forward (again). DOI support So, DOIs. That was (and is) a though one. Let me guide you through the process.
I worked on updates for Citation.js in the past few weeks, and I thought I'd go over them in this post. Async First of all, Citation.js now has support for asynchronous parsing, so it won't lag your app as much when it uses e.g. the Wikidata API. This is good, as synchronous requests are not only blocking your app, but also deprecated in most major browsers.
Citation.js now supports BibJSON. How I did that without actually updating Citation.js? Well, apparently I supported it all along. I've supported the quickscrape output format since July last year, and that turned out to be BibJSON. How convenient. I'll update the demo and docs to reflect this revelation (currently it just says "quickscrape's JSON scheme"), and, now that I can find actual documentation, some improvements to the parser.
A few weeks ago I published version 0.2.11 of Citation.js. The main change was the addition of jQuery.Citation.js, updated for version 2 of Citation.js. jQuery.Citation.js is a small jQuery plugin to build simple forms where you can fill in metadata, which gets translated to CSL-JSON. The configuration options are currently quite limited, so it only really works as a demo for Citation.js itself.
The new update (Citation.js v0.2.10) doesn't have a big impact on the API, but a lot has changed in the back end. ("back end" as in the helper functions that are called when the API is used.) First of all, there is Travis build tests now. It doesn't have edge test cases yet, but it covers the basics. Testing the basic specs The main thing is the new BibTeX I/O system. It isn't completely new, but a lot has changed.
In the last two weeks I've been busy with making Version 0.2 of Citation.js. Here I'll explain some of the changes and the reasoning behind them. In the past months I've updated Citation.js several times, and the changes included a Node.js program for the commandline and better Wikidata input parsing. While I was working with the "old" code, I noticed some annoying issues in it. One of the biggest things was the internal data format.
When developing Citation.js, I needed to get a JavaScript Object from a string representing one. There are several methods for this, and the one that comes to mind first is JSON.parse(). However, this didn't work.
Last week I made Citation.js usable for the command line, with Node.js. First of all, the main file determines if it is being run with Node.js or in the browser, and switches to Browser or Nodejs mode based on that.
Today I updated my GitHub repository of Citation.js. The main difference in the source files was the correction of a typo, but I updated the docs and restructured the directories as well.