The BibTeX-XML-HTML Project was developed by Michael Auth and Frank Richter at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Tübingen.

The impetus to begin this project came from the extensive list of all publications of the Tübingen HPSG-Projects.
This bibliography was available in the BibTeX format, and the first idea was to create a program that could convert BibTeX files automatically into HTML files.
In addition we wanted to display the web bibliography in the same way as the BibTeX entries are displayed in LaTeX.

It was Frank Richter, lecturer at the Department of Linguistics, who had the idea to expand the process of conversion in order to combine the web bibliography with all the functional capabilities of HTML:

First, all BibTeX entries were converted into one HTML file.
As all entries of the bibliography could be classified into seperate thematic categories, it was only logical to generate seperate HTML files for each category.

Moreover, these thematically classified bibliographies were to be accessible by links displayed graphically in an overview table in a separate HTML file.

In addition, there were to be a separate page containing a complete Bibtex entry to each entry for pasting it into your own Bibtex file.

These requirements were far too complex for the conversion tools provided by the internet. To carry out this project a special tool had to be developed.
From the beginning the most important requirement was to create a tool that could work independently from the underlying BibTeX file and so could be used flexibly and universally.

To meet all these requirements, especially the tool flexibility, it was quite obvious that the conversion of BibTeX into HTML should not be carried out directly, but by first translating the BibTeX file into an XML file.

Unlike the BibTeX format the XML format is standardized, universal, and available on all computer platforms. Moreover, XML offers a wide range of tools such as the XSLT/Xpath language to generate web-based documents.

Fundamental to the conversion from BibTeX to XML was the work of Brenno Lurati and Luca Previtali at the ETH Z¨rich. They provided a tool for both BibTeX to XML and also XML to BibTeX translation at their website (http://bibtexml.org - this site is offline now!) Lothar Lemmnitzer of the MiLCA Project has worked with the BibTeX to XML tool and has put it to use on his website.

After a series of tests the finished tool now serves all the requirements listed above.
It has been used repeatedly - have a look at the HPSG online bibliography which shows the range of the tool.