- Identifying document fragments for translation is another instance of the
same problem of associating metadata with document fragments *across edits*. Citations, content-translation, comments-as-documentation, authorship information, maintaining-association-between-translated-fragments, etc. are all different instances of this problem. Translate extension seems to be using comments in wikitext markup as one way to maintain this cross-edit-association. Maybe there is value in thinking about this problem broadly.
Definitely. As we have discussed earlier, the definition of what is a "breaking change" does vary between the different use cases, and in fact is left to a humans (translation admins) to decide in the page translation feature. But the other approach of each tool implementing it from scratch is not ideal either.
Slightly, but not entirely tangentially, here are some old notes of mine about metadata markup. Don't get hung up on the specific form of the syntax. And, I am also not proposing that we change cite to use that new markup ... I am mostly noting that cite is not "that special" in terms of this model of metadata annotations on dom nodes.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:SSastry_%28WMF%29/Notes/Wikitext#Core_id...
I have not updated these notes for over a year now ... so, it might be dusty in there ..
Subbu.