Last modified: 2008-11-19 15:46:39 UTC
This is a simple request for an extension of Cite.php to deal with a list of footnotes separate from the list of references. A <note> tag should work exactly like a <ref> tage, and a <notes/> tag exactly like a <references/> tag. Perhaps the footnotes list should be highlighted in red rather than blue o distinguish it from the references list. There are currently two ways of working with footnotes (i.e. parenthetical notes on the content, as distinguished from references). One is the same inelegant method that was used for references before the <ref> tag was developed. The other is to mix them in with the references, which does not work well with the heavily-referenced Wikipedia style. For example, a typical featured article on Wikipedia might need four footnotes, but over a hundred references. Please excuse any misstatements of technical terms that I may have made above; I am pretty ignorant of programming structure.
Or, ever better, would be a generalized syntax for an arbitrary number of separate reference-type sections on one page. Thanks.
Generalized syntax could simply be an attribute: <ref type="foo">...</ref> <references type="foo"/> - however, it's not clear how the numbering should be handled. maybe have a "style" parameter in the <references> that lets you pick upper/lower letters, upper/lower roman numerals, */**/***, */†/‡, etc
If we adopt the generalized syntax, perhaps it still might make sense to use <note> as a shorthand for something that's likely to be the most common alternative to plain-vanilla <ref>.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 5265 ***
*** Bug 16389 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
