Tony Sidaway wrote:
I only wish we had something better than the revoltingly ugly reference mechanism we have at present ("ref" tags), which required the editor to place all kinds of obstrusive metadata into the body of an article when he really wants it to appear at the end. This makes the text of the article very difficult to read and edit.
I'm exactly the opposite. I love having a system whereby I can put metadata right in the exact same place in the article's source as the data that it's referencing. I very rarely did detailed referencing of my work before this system came along, usually just tossing an external link to the source I was working from in "external links" (in those rare cases where I was working with offline sources I might not even do that since a book reference isn't an "external link"). It's super-easy to put in detailed inline references now, though, even to non-Internet sources.
What would be nice is to have an editor a little fancier than a plain old text box, though. Simply having different colors for the different types of text (reference, header, link, image, etc) would make the source way easier to read. No idea how to go about crafting such a thing, though.