On 8/14/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
If the person designing the references syntax had thought about this a bit more, these severe problems should have been apparent to them. A much more sensible thing would be to use [1], [2] etc. in the text, and define the references in the place where they are actually displayed -- the References section. (Duh.)
If you had thought about this a bit more, the severe problems with your suggestions should be apparent to you. :) More precisely, neither you nor Avar probably saw all the arguments for each side before you made your respective statements/commits. (When Avar did it, the arguments against hadn't been *developed*, due to lack of experience.)
Basically, the advantages of having just a reference name be in the text itself, and the text in the references section, are intuitiveness and less clutter. The advantages of having the full reference in the text are that it works with section editing, and the ref doesn't break invisibly if someone transplants the section or whatever without thinking to move the refs as well. Trust me, that's constant and horrible with the {{ref}} style: I've had to spend half an hour or more on more than one occasion digging through page histories to figure out where the references disappeared.
Jay is right that coloring the refs probably wouldn't be too hard with current wikitext. Ideally, WYSIWYG would handle refs in some special way so that editing them is fully intuitive and uncluttered. Something like being able to click the ref number to bring up a floating popup-y thing that you could edit, while also being able to click the ref in the references section and edit that directly, with the Javascript keeping them synced and secretly editing only the <ref> contents either way.