Make my CSL valid - how?

wunderfrollein
Hi,

I somehow manged to alter a citation-style to meet the requirements for my bachelor-thesis given by my prof. As others have the same prof, I am thinking about distributing it later to students that also work with her, after completing it and testing it thoroughly. But something bothers me already:

As I update the style, Zotero tells me, that this .csl is not a valid .csl in Zotero and that this may cause problems. (in german: "keine gültige CSL-Datei") However, it doesn't cause any problems so far - but still, I want to make it valid.
What can I do? Where's the problem? Is it only valid it it's uploaded?

(Btw if someone wants to know more: It's a german literature studies style - but as every prof of my faculty has different standards and this is exactly written for only one of them, it won't be too usefull for the public, i assume. Also, until now, it's only designed to work perfectly with books, chapters, and magazine-articles incl. online-sources - hadn't had time/need for the rest yet)

Thanks!
  • zuphilip
    You can validate your csl file at http://validator.citationstyles.org/ . Moreover, we can have a look at your file if you copy and paste your csl file to https://gist.github.com/ and write here the url for that.
  • wunderfrollein
    Ah, a validator - that's pretty obvious. I didn't look for this ^^ Thank you!
    Aaand...10 errors. Yeah, I think I have to work on it (though it works fine for me)
    Problem might be, that I left the language as en, while I need some terms in german - I just "redefined" them and that seems to be not okay.

    So, that would be the file: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1659a7e5ae7a0186eb80

    The ID, URL, and other stuff in the "head" is just made up...I felt I had to put something there.
    I know, it's not "clean" or however you call it, when everthing is perfect - but I "teached" myself doing this in two days after failing a programming-class 3 times in a row years ago - so for me it's already a miracle seeing this thing work somehow. (Btw now it works with encyclopedia entries and thesis too)

    Thank you again.
  • adamsmith
    edited February 2, 2015
    let us know if you need help with any of the validation errors in particular.
  • zuphilip
    1) Language and terms: Yes, it is better to define the language correct, i.e. default-locale="de-DE" in line 2. If you need any other terms, you can define them additionally. But make sure that you close the `term` correctly.
    2) If it is not first, then you have to use "else-if" and not "if".
    3) Indentation helps to read and edit this file, e.g. try http://www.freeformatter.com/xml-formatter.html
  • wunderfrollein
    Thank you very much, but I got it now by myself. 0 errors left!
    OT: Am I supposed to delete this discussion now, as it probably isn't that helpful for others? I don't know, how you handle it in this particular forum.
  • adamsmith
    no, just leave it.
  • wunderfrollein
    Oh, zuphilip, I saw your post too late. But thank you too. But I will try to set it to german. If it doesn't mess up the whole thing, I will handle it this way, but if it does, I will stay english and maybe get back to it later.
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