The BibTeX-XML-HTML Project was initiated and carried out by Michael Auth and Frank Richter at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Tübingen with support from Lothar Lemnitzer, Torsten Marek, Wolfgang Maier, and many others.

The original impetus for this project came from an extensive list of publications by the Tübingen HPSG research groups.
This bibliography was available in BibTeX, and our first goal was to create a program that could convert BibTeX files automatically into HTML files for publication on the web.
In addition, we wanted to display the web bibliographies in the same format in which BibTeX entries are displayed in LaTeX bibliographies. Since no satisfying solution to this could be found anywhere, we decided that it was time to go ahead and come up with our own.

Frank Richter had the idea of expanding the conversion process in order to enhance the web bibliography with the various attractive and convenient functional capabilities of HTML:

First, the file with the BibTeX entries was to be converted into one large HTML file with all the original entries.
As all entries of the bibliography could be classified into various thematic categories, it was only logical to want to generate separate HTML bibliographies for each thematic category for easier access.

Moreover, the thematic sub-bibliographies were to be accessible by links displayed graphically in an overview table in yet another HTML file.

Finally, for each entry in the bibliographies we wanted a separate page containing the complete BibTeX entry in such a format that it was suitable for directly copying and pasting it into the BibTeX files of future users of the bibliographies.

These requirements were far too complex for the conversion tools provided on the Internet at the time. To meet them, a new set of tools had to be developed.
From the beginning the most important requirement was to create software that was independent of the formating constraints of the underlying BibTeX file and could be used flexibly and universally.

To meet all these requirements, in particular the one about the maximal flexibility of the new tool, it became quickly clear that the conversion from BibTeX to HTML should not be carried out directly, but via a first translation from BibTeX to XML.

Unlike the BibTeX format the XML format is standardized, universal, and available on all major 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 is the work of Brenno Lurati and Luca Previtali at the ETH Zürich. They provided a tool for converting from BibTeX to XML, and also back from XML to BibTeX at their website (http://bibtexml.org - this site has now been gone for many years). Lothar Lemnitzer of the MiLCA Project had worked with the BibTeX to XML tool and had put it to use on his website. He helped us with its adaptation as a preprocessing tool for the envisioned conversion from BibTeX to HTML. With additional help by Torsten Marek in late 2005 and early 2006, we finally managed to get the conversion from BibTeX to XML to work on all major Linux distributions in addition to its native Solaris environment. An important bug fix was contributed by Marion Zepf in February 2013.

Our current software packages now meet all the requirements listed above.
These packages have been used by many people over a period of several years and can thus be considered stable and safe. For an example of what can be done with them, take a look at the HPSG online bibliography, which will give you an idea of the range of features provided by this conversion software.