Re: use case: page based scholarly reference?

Right. I believe that, on long term, the page has to be exchanged against some fraction ID that reflects some real fraction id in the HTML file but can also be put into print easily.

Liam and Bill referred to the fake page break signs, which is a hack, and ugly in the sense that where a page break occurs is unpredictable (it will depend on the font and font size, the window size, etc, which are all elements that can be set by the end user in a proper reading environment). So indeed, a convention must be found.

Back to our original question, though: does this represent a kind of a use case that we would have to take into account for fraction ID-s? I believe the answer is yes, but I cannot properly formulate it. I think the idea is that it should be easy to find very flexible way of addressing a logical structure in a human readable way. The problem is that, unless the original author/publisher does not do it by defining an @id for a specific section, the fragment id-s that one have to use to say 'second paragraph of chapter entitled XYZ' is hardly readable to the non-initiated…

Bill do you have a good formulation to add to our collection?

Ivan

P.S. An aside: the social problem with this is also that this community is very conservative. Users, ie, researchers, are extremely wary leaving the beaten path because they are afraid that this would damage their publication list, ie, their CV, ie, their career path. People will continue publish on the old-style, traditional journals, accepting the PDF, print, and page oriented publication routes, and will not readily move to more modern style publications; they need the renown provided by the Nature, or various Elsevier publications for their own career. In a time when 'publish or perish' dominates, when younger researchers have immense difficulties getting a stable position somewhere, they cannot be blamed. And the big, traditional publishers are therefore not really under a pressure to change. It is complicated...



> On 10 Jun 2015, at 16:15 , Robin Berjon <robin@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> On 10/06/2015 14:02 , Ivan Herman wrote:
>> I am not sure what this translates into in a requirement for the
>> identification part, namely that 'reasonable' units within the
>> publication should have an easily identifiable URL, or URL structure
>> (note that the examples above actually define ranges and not only one
>> page). This may be a page but that is a fluid notion in this case,
>> that may not be appropriate for scholarly purposes. But I am a bit
>> uncertain how to formulate it before putting it into the use case
>> directory…
> 
> One question I have reading this is about usability. Imagining some form of resilient linking is used (the example below is from Emphasis 2 [0] but others tend to be the same), if I wanted to anchor a link to a paragraph I'd end up with something that looked like:
> 
>  D. Ahut, et al., “Sustainable Critical Avalanches of Alpine Fauna,” Cryptozoology, vol. 42, #p[MMTMMT],h[BcdTcg,1], Mar. 1977
> 
> The "#p[MMTMMT],h[BcdTcg,1]" bit can replace pages (you can also do ranges with it) and so long as you're in a digital context in which it is presumably clickable it's fine; but when it shows up in print as it invariably will, well, I'd hate to have to type that back in.
> 
> Is this something that should be a consideration, or should references from print to digital be largely considered hopeless anyway (since in practice you just search for the paper's title)?
> 
> [0] http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/emphasis-update-and-source/
> 
> --
> Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon
> 


----
Ivan Herman, W3C
Digital Publishing Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704