On 06/08/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
Is this a bad idea? Personally, I find the ISBN markup extremely arbitrary and maybe not that well thought out. We apparently only allow pure ISBN numbers, with no hyphens, spaces or slashes, although they are usually presented that way in other contexts. By wrappering this syntax in standard template syntax, we would clear the way for a future, more forgiving ISBN syntax to be implemented.
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You're allowed hyphens but not slashes. Are ISBNs sometimes written with slashes? If so, we'll add that to the character list. We have to be fairly conservative with the regular expression when we're detecting things in plain text. I don't think there's any need to introduce a new "abstract" syntax before we can make that change.
Hyphens are, I believe, the only punctuation in the standard - certainly I've never encountered anything else whilst cataloguing books.
What would be nice is implementing ISBN-colon-space as well as just ISBN-space as a prefix, so that both
ISBN 0123456789 and ISBN: 0123456789
produce the booksources link.