RE: [selectors] An Idea for CSS4 Selectors

CSS Working Group,
François Remy,

Thank you, those CSS4 features (http://dev.w3.org/csswg/selectors4/#idref-combinators) could be of use for customizing a citations and referencing system. For example, a citing element, something like <cite cite="#ref1"/> could refer to a <reference> element, <reference id="ref1"/>, and then, as per a CSS style indicative of a document style (http://www.lib.umd.edu/ues/guides/citing-styles), the citation appears rendered in the document.
 
Rendering <reference/> elements with CSS, for example per each of the aforementioned document styles, is another interesting topic. <reference> elements, describing numerous types of materials with metadata model(s), can be implemented with XML attributes from the HTML namespace, extensible XML attributes from external XMLNS, nested <meta/> elements, or with other techniques. The idea can be summarized as XML-based and CSS-based solutions for enhancing scholarly and scientific documents and communications and could involve, in addition to some markup topics, topics with regard to several existing CSS modules (http://www.w3.org/TR/#tr_CSS) and possibly some new CSS modules.
 
Those CSS4 features could be of use to XML-based systems for referring to charts, diagrams, equations, figures and other document elements in documents as well, possibly interoperably with auto-numbering features.
 
HTML 5.1 is underway, the topic of digital publishing (http://www.w3.org/QA/2012/11/w3c_and_digital_publishing.html) is under discussion in the HTML Working Group, as is the subtopic of enhancing scholarly and scientific documents and communication. A design goal could include HTML 5.1 document markup which can be styled to any scholarly and scientific document style.



Kind regards,
 
Adam Sobieski