On 9/17/07, Maury Markowitz <maury.markowitz(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/17/07, Jim Hu <jimhu(a)tamu.edu> wrote:
I'm a bit confused. Are cite and ref tags
two different things? I
recognize ref tags from the Cite.php extension.
This is part of the confusion. There are three different things being
discussed, but editors have used the terminology interchangeably,
greatly confusing matters.
"FOOTNOTE": a stylistic solution to inserting small amounts of text
that would otherwise break up the flow of a statement. Other solutions
include the sidebar, callouts, and pop-up text. In the case of the
wiki, we don't really have anything that represents these directly.
"REFERENCE": any link to another work. in the case of the wiki, we
expect these to be the set of resources that are used to build the
article.
"CITATION": a somewhat formal system for including a reference to
another work, typically a journal or similar. In the case of the wiki,
these
Now why do I complain they are confused? Well for one, go visit the
wiki page on footnotes. Note that the entire article is about
references! And where is the REF tag defined? In CITE.PHP!
Maury
The terminology stuff is only irritating; it might be worth coding to
fix it, might not.
Footnotes... stylistically, many forms of reference work never include
any. Some do. Usage is completely inconsistent field to field. We
have some alternative notation methods, but can probably do without
them.
That said; one could cheat and duplicate the <ref> system with new
keywords <footnote> and <footnotes>, or generalize cite.php a bit and
have it auto-handle both types (say, <ref name="foobar"
type=footnote>In most Elven languages, the pluperfect form is used
only in drinking songs and sagas</ref>, and have the <references/>
generate subsections for both "references" and "footnotes" if
present.
These would both be easy hacks.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com