4 Titles
There are three elements that can be used for titles: title, subtitle, and titleabbrev.
The first two are obvious. The third is typically used to designate a shortened title, which some styles use for notes. (e.g., CMOS short notes).
I propose requiring at least the title element and allowing the other two elements with the following interpretation:
If
titleis the only element, then any place that needs the title, including places that could use a shortened title, uses the value oftitle.If
titleand one or moresubtitleelements exist, but there is notitleabbrevelement, usetitlefor the shortened title and combinetitleand thesubtitletag(s) (with a style-specific separator) for the full title.If
titleabbrevexists (with or without a subtitle) use it for a shortened title and handle the full title as described above.
Two (or even more) subtitles. For example, DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide: The Official Documentation for DocBook. In this case, the author can use
titleabbrevto identify the desired shortened title (just DocBook 5 or DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide).A very long title or a title that the author wants to shorten in a non-obvious manner. Again, the author can use
titleabbrevto identify the desired shortened title. For example, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a shortened version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
subtitle elements, which the DocBook schema currently does, gives the style flexibility in how to separate the titles. For example, CMOS separates the title from the first subtitle with a colon and the first subtitle from the second with a semicolon.
title role="translation" should be allowed in addition to the title to provide a translated title (e.g., in CMOS style, L'Étranger [The Stranger]).
4.1 pubwork
Because the type of a biblioentry or a biblioset is defined in the parent element, I don’t think it’s necessary to add pubwork to title or to use citetitle in place of title.
4.2 abbrev
The default and the ISO 690 stylesheets use abbrev to generate an inline reference and as the label for an entry in a bibliography.
However, but it might be better to generate the text in these two cases from other information, such as the author's name and the pubdate, since inline references may or may not contain punctuation. I suggest it be allowed as an override but not required.