Magnus Manske wrote:
On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Oldak Quill
<oldakquill(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Great work. Would it be possible to adapt this
into a tool to separate
the source of an article into: references and everything else?
Slightly different: would it be possible to have an editing interface
where tags of the form "<ref name="">{{template}}</ref>"
in the body
are pulled out to a separate text box, leaving a token in the body
text (e.g. <ref name="" />)? Separating the content of these tags
would clean up the body when editing and the token left in the body
would indicate that there is a tag here and that it has this name (see
ref text box).
Technically, yes, should be possible (in the article namespace, there
should be no "funny" nowiki constructs etc.).
But would that really help? I can see where it would be good to have a
reference replaced with, say, some tiny red number that one can click
on an that expands into the reference. But in a plain text editor,
there'd still be the "empty" reference; I'd have to make up some ID
for "unnamed" ones; then make some pseudo-text-table edit box
somewhere.
What'd help, IMO, is not requiring the actual body of the reference to
be inline at the point of the first use, which results in a bunch of
messy markup in the middle of a paragraph. If all the inline references
could be of the form <ref name="foo" />, and the actual definition of
reference "foo" were somewhere else (above the main text, below it,
wherever), that'd make the references a lot more intrusive. It seems
this would be a markup/parser change, not requiring any sort of
interface-side change.
-Mark