W3C (Harvard) References (was Re: Footnotes?)

> On Nov 19, 2007, at 5:24 AM, Bijan Parsia wrote:
> 
> >
> > Sorry to be pesky today, but I'm wondering if it's possible to  
> > enable footnote support:
> > 	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes
> >
> > (basically <ref>...</ref> and <references/>)
> >
> > I feel a pretty strong desire for them in:
> > 	http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/OWL_Numerics
> > and they could be handy for linking to use cases or email that  
> > support a feature.
> >
> > I can simulate them, of course, but I figured if it were an easy  
> > toggle to flip, might as well ask!

Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> +1 for footnotes. Needs an extension installed: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cite/Cite.php

There's more to this issue, which is why I haven't done it yet.  I dove
into it some week ago, got tangled in the weeds, and haven't made it
back.  In the process of writing this, though, I guess I've sorted it
out.

The problem with 'Cite' is that it supports only numeric referencing,
not "Harvard referencing".   Wikipedia has some pages about this...

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Harvard_referencing
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes

I think Harvard referencing is the preferred approach for W3C...

   http://www.w3.org/2001/06/manual/#References

and is certainly used in the OWL 1.0 specs.  We could decide to switch
to numeric footnotes like 'Cite' offers, but we should not do so lightly.

I think what we want can be done with a pair of templates, which I just
wrote, one for use in the text:

   {{ref|RFC-3987}}

and the other for use in the Reference section:

  {{refdef|RFC-3987
  |<cite>[http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987.txt RFC 3987 - Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs)]</cite>. M. Duerst, M. Suignard. IETF, January 2005, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987.txt.}}

Perhaps refdef could have various forms for various kind of citations;
that's not so important now.

For an example of these template in use, see
   http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Example_References

Does that do what we want?    Ideally, it could give errors if the
strings used in {{ref| ... }} didn't line up with those used in refdef,
but ah well (some other tool can check for that).

That said --- perhaps we still want numeric references for
academic-style references in non-spec documents?

     -- Sandro

Received on Tuesday, 20 November 2007 04:20:26 UTC