On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 05:51:55PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
Firstly, if you spot a typo in a reference, the instinct is to click the "edit" link for the References section. But then all you see is:
== References ==
<references/>
The other thing is that if you spot a typo in the middle of a paragraph which has inline references in every sentence, it is *extremely* hard to find that typo because all the inline references distract. You look somewhere and you don't even know if you're looking at the paragraph or the inside of a <ref> tag.
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.)
Well, now; *here* we go into water that's easier to deal with: even now, and particularly once the syntax is cleaned up a bit, it wouldn't be that hard, I don't think, to implement syntax coloring in the wikitext editor (he says, not being the one who's gonna write the code :-), which would make it substantially easier to deal with such circumstances.
And FWIW, I'm split, Timwi, on whether it's better to put the reference inline or not; I can see good arguments both ways.
Cheers, -- jra