Maury Markowitz wrote:
And if the line break after the /ref tag adds a space it's no problem since that's usually intended anyway.
Uhhh, no. This is a very very very bad assumption. At least 80% of my refs do NOT appear in a place where a break is appropriate.
The only situation I can think of where it's not appropriate to have a space _after_ the ref is when there's a string of multiple references grouped together. What situations are you thinking of?
I don't like this idea much, it seems likely to make the references a lot more "fragile" than they currently are.
I can't imagine a LESS stable system than the one we have currently! One missplaced char in the tags and the rest of the article disappears!
Actually, IMO it's much better to have errors like that than errors that "silently" break things. Having a big chunk of article disappear, or having it appear in a hashed-up form down in the references section (as often happens when I typo a </ref>) is obvious and indicates the location of the error quite easily. Under the old {{ref}} templates I would often find ref links with no note text, orphaned note text without references to it, and refs pointing to the wrong notes, all of which looked completely normal and could only be identified as problematic by clicking on the links and noticing that they didn't take you anywhere.
Under the current cite.php system the "quietest" way a ref can break is to not have any text associated with it, which results in a blank note down in the references section. This is still pretty obvious. Just the other day I went and fixed three of them in the [[2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict]] page. It was easy to spot them despite there being nearly 200 other references in that article.
There's a basic rule here that is best known in the computer industry: longer code contains more errors. By separating the ref "markers" from the ref "body" the main article text becomes smaller and easier to read. This will lead to LESS errors with refs. It will also mean that cutting and pasting will not lead to the sorts of errors we see today where someone moves a para containing a placeholder to an earlier ref and the entire ref system stops working again.
That's an exaggeration, only that _particular_ ref stops working in that case. And the failure results in a highly noticeable blank reference, making it obvious that it needs fixing.
If you've referenced a large block of text this way then one could easily wind up cutting and pasting chunks that might break the citations, and it goes back to the {{ref}} template's old problem of having to change two separate sections of the article when adding or removing a reference.
This is a valid concern, but was the problem worse than the terrible mess we have now?
I've converted a lot of {{ref}}/{{note}} articles over to the new ref system in the course of my travels through Wikipedia and I'd estimate something like a quarter of the articles with non-trivial numbers of references in them had missing or orphaned references. In the case of cite.php I can only recall two articles requiring major reference repair work (both of which had been split out of the article [[Hugo Chavez]]). Doesn't seem very terrible to me.
It seems to me the only reason this doesn't work now is because the original ref body must appear before all references to it. If this were changed one could do refs any way they want, as well as fixing the problem with editing.
It would make it harder to track down where the ref's actual text was, though.
I suppose making your proposal an optional variation to the existing system wouldn't be too bad, though there'd be some extra work cleaning up old orphaned references that had gone "invisible" through disuse but were still tucked away in the article's source code. Yet another tidy-bot, I suppose.