What do you mean, using the text within the tags? Like <ref name="foo">Text to append</ref>? That strikes me as inevitably ambiguous, unless order becomes important again.
Yes, that was the suggestion, and the problem with it. I was wondering if someone had solved the problem and I simply missed the message.
It's impossible, unless I'm really missing something. If the only two refs with name "name" in a document are
<ref name="name">Foo</ref> <ref name="name">Bar</ref>
would the ref text be FooBar or BarFoo? Which is the base and which is appended? You presumably don't want to make order important again.
The idea requires an additional tag containing the information common to each citation.
<ref name="name">pp 1-7</ref> <ref name="name">pp 8-14</ref> <xref name="name">The Best Book Ever Written</xref>
This would produce two lines in the references section:
The Best Book Ever Written pp 1-7 The Best Book Ever Written pp 8-14
It might be better not to use <ref> and come up with a new name in order to keep backwards compatibility.