On 12/12/07, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
Um, where else would you put ref syntax and material if not in the edit box? The other, secret edit box?
On the topic of secret[1] boxes, it would be possible to do something like this as an ugly hack:
[[Miss Libby]]'s car is green.<ref name="foo"/> [[Billy]] likes to drink [[soda]].<ref name="bar"/>
==References==
<div style="display:none;"> <ref name="foo">{{cite news|...|TL|...|DR|...}}</ref> <ref name="bar">{{cite news|...|TL|...|DR|...}}</ref> </div> {{reflist}} <!-- contains "<references/>" plus some petty formatting options -->
[[Category:Living people]] {{stub}}
The one obvious downside[2] is that even the invisible instance of the <ref> populates the alphabetical upward anchor ("go back") links that appear at the beginning of each line of the ref-list at the end, which would look something like:
- ^ a b [actual text of ref].
(that is...)
<li id="_note-foo">^ <a href="#_ref-foo_0" title=""><sup><i><b>a</b></i></sup></a> <a href="#_ref-foo_1" title=""><sup><i><b>b</b></i></sup></a> [html to produce actual text of ref] </li>
As a result the first "go back" link would point to the sentence where the ref is actually used, but the second one (i.e. the one containing the bold-italic-superscript lowercase "b") would point to an invisible <div> wherein the ref is defined. This may cause babies to cry.
On the other hand, it has somewhere been suggested that we play with the idea of a non-self-closing <references> tag like this:
The sky is blue<ref name="foo">{{cite news|...|TL|...|DR|...}}</ref> and the water is green.<ref name="bar"/>
==References==
<references> <ref name="bar">{{cite news|...|TL|...|DR|...}}</ref> [other refs, but not "foo" which is already defined in-line] </references>
[[Category:Ecology]] {{stub}}
The wikitext inside the <references> block would be sort of a safe zone where <ref>s can be defined without incrementing the usage count or creating confusing "one-way" anchor links, avoiding the problem presented by the "ugly hack" above. Any text within the <references> block but not part of any individual <ref> would probably best be disregarded.
If we get something like this to work, our friendly {{reflist}} template could be modified to accommodate it, i.e. change:
<references/>
to:
<references>{{{actual_refs|}}}</references>
Here, the parameter {{{actual_refs}}} (or whatever you want to call it) would contain zero or more named <ref> tags, separated by as much or as little desired white space or (invisible) editors' notes regarding each ref, or whatever.
This assumes that a blank parameter value (or one not containing any refs, only gibberish) would cause the <references></references> block to behave the same as the self-closing status quo.
—C.W.
[1] Or would such boxes merely be considered "private"? [2] The one non-obvious downside would exist for browsers which can't handle the specified CSS.