2008/12/4 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
A popular approach? No offense, but isn't this just the way it should have been done all along? It is certainly the way many journals and books do it, and it is common sense.
Yes, yes it is. :-)
In practice - as far as I've seen it - most referencing puts the refs directly into the text and then invokes them with <ref name="foo"/> every time they're later used, the practice originally objected to; this has a whole host of unfortunate side-effects, including the mess of backlinks at the bottom when a single reference is called twenty times, and the fact that it discourages specific citation by page number.
When I say the notes-then-refs is "popular", what I mean is that I seem to be seeing it more and more recently... anecdotally, I'd say it's becoming more common to do this from the start rather than when "formalising" the article for FA status. I've no idea how easily we can quantify this guess, though.
(One day, I really need to go through all the articles I've written and sort out their references...)