On 25/09/2007, Maury Markowitz maury.markowitz@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/24/07, Liz Kim lizkim270@gmail.com wrote:
Does anyone know a way to manipulate the referencing style in wiki?
We were _just_ talking about this in another thread. How would you like it to work? There are a couple of different styles available in HTML and I would _guess_ that it would be fairly easy to modify the <references/> tag (and {{reflist}}) to allow you to select one of these. But that would still be an enumerated list.
Another possibility is one I think might be more interesting, and that's that the ref tags themselves have a "link=" or "tag=" where you could define a specific tag on a per-ref basis. For instance...
<ref name="Smith" link="Smi89"> a reference by Smith from 1989 </ref>
This would be very useful in matching technical documentation referencing style. The only problem is it would require the editors to be careful about putting in a "link=" for _every_ ref, because I'm not sure a fallback would be easy, <references/> uses LI to generate the list and that doesn't take kindly to inserting other things in the middle of the list.
If the "link" attribute is required to be unique (which would make sense), then why not use the already-unique, required, free-text field on all of these elements - namely the "name" attribute. :-)
Its messy, but on a two-parse you could have an optional attribute on the references element ('citestyle="numbers|name"'), or if you only want to do one-parse a messier way would be to have a keyword modifier, __CITEUSINGNAME__ and __CITEUSINGNUMBERS__ or whatever. Of course, the sorting of links is the crucial issue, as you say; when building the page model you could collapse the list into HTML. Because, of course, we'd never just generate HTML directly. :-)
Of course, what I'm saying is no-doubt nonsense on stilts; please feel free to ignore. :-)
Yours,