link soup

[Yuri T.]

> There would likely be an external link to a source for the citation in

> the generated "footnote":

> 

>    ....as previously reported [^Jobs and Gates 1984], the nature of...

> 

>    [^Jobs and Gates 1984]: Blah blah blah. [LinkToOnlineSource][]

> 

> but the purpose of the Markdown syntax would be to make what is

> essentially (on a web page at least) just a footnote with a particular

> style. No ?


Proper bibliographic references are more than footnotes.  First, there
would need to be a way to support several styles of references. 
Second, for each style there are several separate cases depending on
how the reference is used in the text:

As was pointed out by Einstein (1905), blah blah blah.  It was later
pointed out, however, that blah blah (Hawking 2003), which has
attracted much discussion in the literature (Hawking 2004, Smith 2005,
Jones 2005).

which in a different style would become:

As was pointed out by [1], blah blah blah.  It was later pointed out,
however, that blah blah [2], which has attracted much discussion in
the literature [3,4,5].

Note that while the numbered style can be roughly approximated by
footnotes, Harvard looks altogether different.  And it's really not
the case that the numbered style is becoming more popular - it depends
on the field, and I don't know of any that recently moved from Harvard
to numbered.   Also, note that with Harvard style there is a noticable
difference between citations as a none vs. parenthetical citations vs.
multiple parenthetical citations.  Finally, with a proper bibliography
solution one should be able to use a bibliographic database a la
bibtex.  This doesn't make much sense for footnotes.

I think what's causing some confusion is that there are fields like
law that actually use footnotes for bibliographic references and that
many of the computer science publications use numbered references that
do _look_ like footnotes.

 - yuri