On 9/17/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/17/07, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
<avarab(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2) there
should be another, similar, tag for "real" footnotes. <note>
would be great. They would operate identically to (1).
Do you just want the ability to make two citation-like lists per
article whereas you can make one now? If that's the case wouldn't a
system where you can make and flush an arbitrary number of lists be
better?
How many are we likely to want? Enough that general-purposing the
mechanism (rather than a second instance) makes sense?
What I've gathered from the people that want footnotes is that they
want another list per-article they can flush with a different tag,
i.e.:
"""
Some statement<ref name="ref name">This is a reference</ref> and
something to note<note name="note name">This is a note</note>.
== References ==
<references/>
== Notes ==
<notes/>
"""
If that's the case I think *implementation wise* it would be a neat
idea to support reference groups, so the above could be written as:
"""
Some statement<ref group="references" name="ref name">This is a
reference</ref> and something to note<ref group="notes"
name="note
name">This is a note</ref>.
== References ==
<references group="references"/>
== Notes ==
<references group="notes"/>
"""
And since that's a bit more verbose the <note> and <notes> tags could
be provided anyway, they'd just be exactly equivalent to providing a
group=notes (or some other name) to the ref/references pair.
The reason I mention that is that although I'm wont to design crappy
stuff I at least like to make it crappy in a general way so people can
hammer things I hadn't thought of out of it.
Would that cover the notes use case in your (and other list members) opinion?
3) named REFs can have another parameter,
"page=". These would be
collected into the references at the bottom, with each lettered
reference appearing.
A variation of this has already been suggested and I believe there's
an open bug for it. "category" or "section" is more agnostic to the
format being cited than "page" although I guess all could be provided.
How about 'specific="page 45-47"'; that way you can put in whatever
internal location specification makes contextual sense given the media
being referred to...
Something like that, I really don't feel like taking a stance on
specific interfaces given my obviously flawed track record in
designing something people are happy with. But element names should in
my opinion:
1. Be easy to type and remember for an international audience (which
extensions inherently fail at since you can't localize them, but I
digress)
2. Be general enough to apply to pages/chapters/whatever
3. Something else I'm forgetting :)