Magnus Manske wrote:
On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
Great work. Would it be possible to adapt this into a tool to separate the source of an article into: references and everything else?
Slightly different: would it be possible to have an editing interface where tags of the form "<ref name="">{{template}}</ref>" in the body are pulled out to a separate text box, leaving a token in the body text (e.g. <ref name="" />)? Separating the content of these tags would clean up the body when editing and the token left in the body would indicate that there is a tag here and that it has this name (see ref text box).
Technically, yes, should be possible (in the article namespace, there should be no "funny" nowiki constructs etc.).
But would that really help? I can see where it would be good to have a reference replaced with, say, some tiny red number that one can click on an that expands into the reference. But in a plain text editor, there'd still be the "empty" reference; I'd have to make up some ID for "unnamed" ones; then make some pseudo-text-table edit box somewhere.
What'd help, IMO, is not requiring the actual body of the reference to be inline at the point of the first use, which results in a bunch of messy markup in the middle of a paragraph. If all the inline references could be of the form <ref name="foo" />, and the actual definition of reference "foo" were somewhere else (above the main text, below it, wherever), that'd make the references a lot more intrusive. It seems this would be a markup/parser change, not requiring any sort of interface-side change.
-Mark