Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/15/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Why? I can't think why. Of course, the software would have to automatically renumber them if references get deleted or moved around.
Can you elaborate on that? What exactly is your proposal, because anything that involves typing in numbers manually sounds like a terrible idea, at first glance.
The proposal is that a new reference is added the same way as now, but replaced at save-time with a number. All references are re-numbered at save-time so they start at 1 and don't skip numbers.
Currently, if you want to re-insert a second link to an existing reference, you have to hunt down its name (or worse, first assign one yourself, for which you would potentially have to know the other names in use so yours doesn't clash with them). Ideally you should only need to look at the (rendered) References section to get the number, and then type something like [1] to insert it.
I find your statement "anything that involves typing in numbers manually sounds like a terrible idea" amazing -- does that mean you find "<ref name='blah'/>" easier to type than "[1]"?
That's another possibility, of course -- although I would still contend that something like [1], or even if it needs to be [ref:1], is much better (easier to read, easier to ignore, easier to type, easier to type without mistakes) than <ref name="ref1"/>.
Still a problem if you have to add the references to a references section (bad if you're doing section editing).
As explained above, you never need to /add/ a reference to the references section (unless you want to add one without a link inline in the text; which, by the way, the current system doesn't allow, which makes for extremely ugly formatting in many References sections). However, one should be able to /edit/ the references in the References section, because that's where they are.
Timwi