Whatever happened to BibTeX 1.0?

Question

BibTeX has many shortcomings but apparently there was (at some point) a plan to develop BibTeX 1.0 with the aim of overcoming at least some drawbacks.

See this paper by Oren Patashnik, the author of BibTeX. However, that paper is from 2003 (!!) and, unless I'm missing something, the plans never materialised. The latest version of BibTeX seems to be 0.99d from 2010.

Now I realise many TeXperts consider Biblatex+Biber the modern alternative but BibTeX still ships with every LaTeX distribution and many journals/publishers use it. Surely there cannot be much harm in improving the default bibliography system that ships with LaTeX.

Is anyone aware of why BibTeX 1.0 was abandoned? Or was it? Finally, and this may be naive, but could there be value in putting BibTeX on, say, github.com/latex3 for people to consider contributing to it?

Answer 1

There are simply too many downsides to BiBTeX for it to be worth developing: among them the lack of multibyte character support, the language it is written in, and the antiquity of many of the styles. I don't know if Oren considers it abandoned or not, but I think it needs abandoning. I see no merit at all in putting it on github.

The BIG difficulty is publishers' own styles and classes that use ancient BiBTeX styles. Many of the styles are available in biblatex, but IMHO TUG need to make a concerted effort to encourage publishers to update their offerings and join the 21st century.

Your kilometerage may, of course, vary.

[edit] I should add that this is not to ignore the work that Oren has put in, nor the many people who have done good things with BiBTeX over the years, and their contributions all need to be preserved whatever direction things go. Publishers will make their own decisions anyway, but my concern is that if biblatex does not gain traction with them, and BiBTeX cannot provide their needs, they will find less reason to support TeX.