From: Alan G I. <ai...@am...> - 2006-07-17 01:57:36
|
>> 2. Is it desirable that citation references in the text >> should look like citation references, as a matter of the >> readability of the reST document, and independent of the >> consideration of whether the >> citation-reference-label-substitution proposal is >> ultimately viewed as worth implementing? On Fri, 14 Jul 2006, David Goodger apparently wrote: > (This seems like a rather leading question, but...) Yes. > Substitutions should look like substitutions also. I think a lot is going to turn on this. Right now we have: 1. citation references should in some way be able to support substitution (although perhaps by eschewing the citation reference mechanism provided by reST) 2. citation references should look like citation references 3. substitutiion references should look like substitution references Now if I understand David's "exploratory proposal" for a citation directive, docutils writer components dealing with the citation reference [goossens_1994]_ would make an inline substitution for the citation reference label based on the following citation directive. .. citation:: goossens_1994 :replace: Goossens (1994) Gossens, Michel and Frank Mittelbach and Alexander Samarin, *The LaTeX Companion*, Addison-Wesley, 1994 Do I have that right? If so, this would satsify 1. and 2. above but I understand David to object that it would not satisfy point 3. above. One suggested response to this was that citation references be considered to always imply substitution, even when the substitution is the same citation label. I find that response a bit "scholastic" in approach, but perhaps worth mentioning. But the question seems to me to be more fundamental: is a citation reference, for which a citation label substitution is desired, more like a citation reference or like an arbitrary substitution reference? I am not yet sure how to provide an argument for my perspective, but I consider it evident that it is not only more like a citation reference but *essentially is* a citation reference. Therefore, it should look in reST like any other citation reference. Anything else will be "surprising". Suppose instead that the reader enconters |goossens_1994|_ in the text. The reader knows only that a (hyperlinked) substitution reference has been encountered. Is it a citation reference? A figure reference? Or some other object? The reader has no way to tell except possibly from an author-specific context (i.e., some clues not mandated by reST). This seems badly wrong. Right? And not only is it hard for a human reader to tell what it intended, it is also hard for a preprocessor to tell whether it should treat this substituion reference as a citation reference or not. And since I think we have agreed that allowing preprocessors interact with reST documents and bibliographic databases to produce citations for the document is a good idea, keeping things easy for preprocessors seems also like a good idea. Cheers, Alan Isaac PS After I get David's response to the above perspective I will try to incorporate both into the citation-enhancement document. |