Re: [Docutils-develop] Docutils 0.8.2 release?

[Alan G I. <ai...@am...>]

On 11/11/2011 2:47 PM, Paul Tremblay wrote:
> I have worked extensively on digital bibliographic databases, and I would recommend that docutils not adopt Alan's approach, since it is cursory and not well thought out.


You are still missing the point of my proposal.
It is **independent of** the issue of bibliographic data bases.

I am simply interested in addressing a common need:
the need to be able to add instance-specific data to a citation.

Comparing with BibTeX, I am just asking for the equivalent
of the optional argument in a BibTeX citation.

Once an reST writer has access to this, it can do *anything it wants*
with this information.  What it will do does not need to be "thought out"
before hand.

i.   documents have citation references
ii.  citation references have keys, which can be keys
      to a bibliographic database.  (While docutils does
      not support databases, bibstuff generates reST citations
      from BibTeX databases.)
iii. citation references should also have instance-specific
      information (comparable to the optional argument in a
      BibTeX citation).
iv.  since docutils is not committed to supporting interaction
      with bibliographic databases, the solution to (iii) should
      be agnostic with respect the existence of such a database

I am addressing **only** (iii).

Can you suggest a bibliographic solution that will not require (iii)?

Alan